We Are Adopting Hive Hard Fork

Based on feedback we've received from the SPORTS community we have made the decision to adopt HF23 to transition SportsTalkSocial.com to the Hive blockchain. Since the infrastructure of Hive Engine isn't yet fully deployed, we are starting with a partial transition and will continue to transition more and more pieces as the infrastructure is rolled out. In the end we hope to see a full transition to Hive by utilizing all the potential of the blockchain. Join us below to learn more about what this will mean for our community and how the roll out is currently planned.

First Steps

Starting today, the first phase of our transition from utilizing the former Steem HF 22 as the back-end provider of content and community for our site to using HF 23 better known as the Hive blockchain.

For a lot of users this won't mean much of a change as long as you are using the normal SportsTalkSocial.com website. All you will need to do as the end user is to refresh your browser page to ensure you have the most recent version of the site. If you share content to the SPORTS ecosystem from another dapp then you will need to be sure they are adopting Hive for you to continue to be shown on our site and receive SPORTS rewards on your new posts. This also means that any content shared via SportsTalkSocial.com will now be stored and earn rewards from the Hive blockchain versus the Steem blockchain.

To give users time to prepare for this change we will continue to have posts on the old Steem HF 22 indexed and rewarded through March 31, 2020. On April 1st, we plan to stop indexing new posts on this version of the Steem blockchain and will only be accepting new posts that are shared to Hive. Again if you are using SportsTalkSocial.com then you will not need to do anything other than refresh your browser. If you are using a third party client then you will need to be sure that your posts are being distributed to Hive using #sportstalk.

Additionally we will also be shutting down a few SPORTS specific features that we've created to help grow the community. This will include the SPORTS payments for delegating Steem Power to @sportsvoter, our daily burn rewards and also our referee system. We will be reviewing the usage of each of these features to better determine which features will get redeployed within the new Hive ecosystem over the coming weeks. These features will be sunset on March 31st, 2020.

What Happens For Next Few Days

Until April 1st both Steem and Hive will be crawled in parallel. This will mean you'll technically be able to use both platforms for the next few days to vote and share with the SPORTS community. To go even deeper into what the next few days will look like please review the following portion of @eonwarped's 'Scot Tribes on Hive' post:

1. Hive chain is crawled in parallel, and processes posts votes in a parallel storage. Accounts will be mirrored with separate voting power from Steem, and stake balances will be taken from the steem account.

• Note that there will be independent mana bars for Steem / Hive. This in essence will double everyone's effective voting ability. This is a technical limitation to the implementation.
• If you set vote multipliers, for now it must be done on the Steem side (When processing hive votes, it looks at whatever multiplier was set on the Steem custom json op. This should be changed in the near future).
• Following authors must be done Steem side (for now). Reblogging does not work yet.
• Promotion ops must be done Steem side. If it is a hive-based post, the permlink needs a prefix, like h@author/permlink. Nitrous instances that have this enabled have already done this.
• A post created from Steem must be voted / commented on Steem. A post created from Hive must be voted / commented from Hive. Note that in order to interact with a Hive post on SportsTalkSocial, you must either use your private key login, or have both steem and hive keychains installed.

1. The timing of when Hive ops are indexed is not predictable, as it is done entirely in parallel. So it can be ahead or behind of the Steem indexing. Meaning, if Steem side is behind, the stake backing your voting power on Hive posts will reflect a slightly behind state.
2. All token operations must still be done on the Steem chain while Steem Engine is not migrated to Hive. In particular, note that new hive accounts that are not on Steem cannot have stake (but they can be delegated to). And they cannot actually claim rewards due to not having a Steem Engine account.
3. Scotbot API exposes endpoints like /@author?hive=1, /@author/permlink?hive=1, and feeds will stream both types, and the posts return have a hive boolean to indicate if the content should be fetched from a Hive node.
4. Pending payouts for hive posts will be collected separately, and listed in your /@author?hive=1 endpoints (This endpoint also contains your voting power and stake).

As mentioned above this will also mean that for the next few days we will continue to payout SPORTS rewards to users delegating to @sportsvoter. It is highly recommended that anyone who is currently delegating to reconsider this delegation over the next few days. After the last payout you will no longer be given any compensation for this delegation. Additionally this will be the last few days of burning rewards for the SPORTS token while it's still on Steem. After March 31st you will still be able to burn SPORTS by sending to @null but you will no longer be sent any rewards for doing so. Finally we'd like to mention that we are cancelling the upcoming referee election normally scheduled for the first. Since there is a code change needed we will be temporary limiting the referee system until further noticed.

Partner Applications

We are going to continue to do what we need to follow our community. Unfortunately this doesn't mean that all of our partner applications will be sharing the same direction. We will continue to work with our partners to iron our how this transition may affect those partnerships and will make the necessary changes needed as a result of these conversations. We will make an additional post in the coming days that will give more details on these future partnerships and any future plans for changes to current partners.

Thank you

I want to end this post by thanking everyone who has put time into this community. It's your dedication to bringing out great sporting content that has kept this tribe going. This is an exciting time and we look forward to maintaining this vibrant sporting community long past this temporary shutdown we've watched through the rest of the sporting world.