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How to join the bdvoter curation trail

Hello everyone, a couple of days ago I discovered about curation trails and how they work. As I get an upvote from the bdvoter every now and than (although I'm not from Bangladesh, so kudos for those!), I thought: let's try to give something back for this community. So here we go!

What is a curation trail?

A curation trail is an automated way of voting. It's a tool made by witness @mahdiyari to automate your votes. It comes in handy when you don't have the time to actively upvote. For example when you're on holidays, have some busy irl stuff to do, etc. Even when you're rather passive, it can help you to get some curation rewards from the upvoting.

Okay, automated upvoting, but how exactly does it work? Well, whenever a certain account which you're 'following for the curation trail' upvotes an article, your account will upvote it aswell. Through the hive.vote site you give your posting authority to be able to do so.

Is it all safe?

It's an open source project, you can find the code in the Github repository of above mentioned developer: https://github.com/mahdiyari/steemauto It's also not a new project, it's already around for a couple of years. The application works with Hivesigner (an equivalent) of keychain to login. So yes, I would dare to say that it's safe.

Because it uses your posting authority, it's only able to post, follow, upvote, reblog and claim rewards. So it doesn't have any access to your balance for example. You can always have a look at their faq or contact them through Hive vote Discord

How to join?

Okay, all good, you convinced me that it's something handy, but where could I find it?
Well, you go to https://hive.vote/ and click on "Login / Register".

Hivesigner will now open a page to login:

Here you have to add your hive name and your master password. I'll quote their own faq to explain why you have to input your master password:

Why should I enter my password/active key at hivesigner.com?
You only have to use your password/active key just one time. We are using hivesigner.com to broadcast the transaction which will allow @steemauto to use your account posting authority. To broadcasting this (and any) transaction you will need to input your password/active key. Of course, you can remove this access at any time by clicking on 'Unauthorize' button in your dashboard.

Afterwards you'll be asked to enter a self-chosen password. Which you have to confirm aswell. As already mentioned Hivesigner is similair to Keychain, it's a password manager and similar to Keychain, you'll have to create such a password to use it more easily instead of always having to enter you key's.

Now you'll be able to login to Hive.vote utilizing hivesigner. You'll have to give hive.vote permission to use your posting authority. After this is all done, you're ready to select the curation trail you want to follow. Click on 'Curation trail'.

Scroll a bit down the page and you'll be able to search for a curationtrail, here you could enter "bdvoter", than click on the search button:

You'll now see a page with the matches for your search string. In this case, only bdvoter:

When you click on 'follow', you'll start to follow the curation trail of 'bdvoter'. So you'll start to upvote every post which bdvoter upvotes aswell until you reach a certain treshhold of voting mana. More about that further in this article.

There are some settings you can adjust:

You can vote on comments, Personally I don't do this, but it's your own choise to do or don't do it.

You can change the voting weight. Here you can choose between Scale voting weight and Fixed voting weight.

Scale voting weight means that you'll upvote a certain percentage of the percentage the holder of the curation trail upvotes. On default it's set on 50%, which means that if @bdvoter upvotes a certain article with 20%, you'll upvote it with 10%.

Fixed voting weight means that you choose your own percentage which will always be applied.

Time to wait before voting This one let's you choose an interval between your automated upvotes. Personally I don't use this but again it's up to you.

I already mentioned that you're able to set a certain threshhold for the upvoting, that's in a different settings menu. Click on 'Dashboard' on the left:

Now click on the settings button:

When you now click on the 'Click to edit' next to 'Upvote mana threshold', you can adapt the threshhold for your upvoting mana:

These are in my opinion the most important settings, so congratulations, you're now able to join the curation trail!

Remarks

• In this article I talked about @bdvoter 's curation trail as I wanted to give something back for his generous upvotes. But ofcourse you could use it for every curation trail which exists. To name a few: @risingstar @wrestorgonline @curie @qurator @ocd @leo.voter @steemmonsters @hivepakistan etc.
• When you are a rather small account, it's best to set your threshhold not too low. Because otherwise your votes will be way to small to even get something noticable.
• If you're actively upvoting quality content yourself, than you'll ofcourse not need this. But maybe even you will disconnect for a couple of days when on holidays.
• I want to stress one last thing: Only follow curation trails who upvote quality content, as we all want that only quality content gets an upvote. That's why I used @bdvoter as an example as I personally like his curations. Ofcourse this is a very subjective ns personal element!

I hope you learned something new by reading this article and feel free to give me your opinion in the comments! Thanks for reading my article!