![](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://i.imgur.com/cUJFrzT.jpg)

It’s been a while since my last post thanks to a fun bout with the flu this past week - but I’m all good now (well except for this darn nagging cough) and I thought I would send out a witness update for those of you who are into that sort of thing!

First the boring technical stuff:

## Technical Stuff

- I have updated my primary and backup witness servers to include the new security patch which was recently released. You can read more about that here: [Security Patch Announcement](https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitdev/security-patch-announcement)


- I have also upgraded to servers with 64 GB of memory since the shared memory size for a witness node is already up to 24 GB and climbing pretty fast! 64 GB should buy me a couple more months hopefully (unless things really take off!) before I’ll bump it up to the next level.

Now onto the more interesting stuff…

## First Philadelphia SteemIt Meetup!

I attended the first Philadelphia SteemIt meetup hosted by @hypnopreneur and it was great! There were about 20 or so people there and many of them were completely new to Steem so it was a great way to spread the word about how awesome Steem is to crypto-enthusiasts in the Philly area.

I also met two gentlemen who are running a small crypto hedge fund in Philadelphia which is partially invested in liquid STEEM. I’m going to be meeting with them in the near future to help answer their questions about how the Steem platform works in more detail and the benefits of powering up some of their STEEM holdings. Also I would like to see if there’s some ways we can work together to bring more visibility and investment into the platform.

## Bringing In New Investors

I’ve created accounts for three new investors since my last update, and while that’s not a huge number by any means, they each have a significant amount of potential funds to invest and have a large network of investors that they can also tap into once they start to see some good results.

My work on the investment front has been slow and tedious but I still hope to bring $1M+ investment of USD into STEEM over the next 3 - 6 months.

## Software Development

From the software development side I am still constantly working on the Post Promoter voting bot software and the [Steem Bot Tracker website](https://steembottracker.com) to make content promotion as simple and user-friendly as possible while also combating abuse.

Recently I have been working with @themarkymark to make a number of changes to the software to stop abusers from using the bots such as shared blacklists, automatic donation of blacklisted bids to abuse-fighting services, and soon the ability for the bot to check if certain accounts like @cheetah, or @steemcleaners have flagged a post and, if so, it will not give it an upvote.

Regardless of where you stand on the vote buying issue, it’s definitely not going away so the least we can do is work to stop the abusers and encourage legitimate content promoters.

In addition to all of the above, I also released a new [Steem Power Delegation Manager Tool](http://steembottracker.com/delegation.html) which you can [read about here] (https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@yabapmatt/new-steem-power-delegation-manager-tool).

I really think that such a delegation management tool should be included right within the wallet page in condenser since it’s such an important (albeit advanced) feature, but until then, at least this one is available. You can also use the vessel desktop software by @jesta to manage delegations, but I thought it would be helpful to have a web-based tool in case you don’t have your personal computer handy.

## Thanks For Your Support!

That’s about it for this update! Thank you very much to everyone who has voted for me and otherwise supported my efforts here - I could not do it without you! 

For everyone else, if you liked what you’ve read and you want to help support my work for the Steem platform I would very much appreciate your vote!

[Click here to vote for me using SteemConnect](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=yabapmatt&approve=1) or go to [https://steemit.com/~witnesses](https://steemit.com/~witnesses) and click the upvote icon next to my name on the list!