My Hive Highlight: Getting LUV and HBIT bots running again.

My Hive Highlight for 2023 lacks panache...it's simply fixing something that was broken. In October, both the LUV and HBIT bots suddenly stopped working. In short, my highlight this year was getting the LUV and HBIT bots going again.

Flashback

My 2021 highlight, setting up LUV: @crrdlx/hive-highlight-2021-is-luv
My 2022 highlight, "The Hive Story Animation": @crrdlx/my-2022-hive-highlight-was-the-the-hive-story-animation

2023 highlight

Here's a quick recap of what happened this year:

• October 20: bots just stopped.
• I was stumped as to what happened (still am).
• For two months, I wrestled with this, trying to get them going.
• It was rather discouraging. I thought about throwing up my hands and being done with it. I wrote my thoughts, "It's been a good run, I've learned some things, hang it up." But, having something hang around unfinished and unfixed nagged at me.

• I reached out a few places on Hive, mostly just trying to be transparent and share that things were not working. A fair number of people use LUV each day to "spread love on the Hive blockchain" and a word of explanation as to why it no longer was available seemed appropriate.
• The community response was amazing and humbling. Lots of folks gave encouragement (which helped). Several folks offered technical suggestions. Most tangible was @flaxz and his suggestion to consider the open source "Alivebot", a fork of the "pizza bot."
• December: After nearly two months, I finally had LUV and HBIT going again thanks to the Hive community's encouragement and help.

I'm still tweaking things (will be working on them as soon as I'm done typing here), but LUV and HBIT are currently working. There are two other related things I hope to do. I also want to tie the @Wusang "game" back into HBIT again as well as get @Helphive up and running again. With Helphive, anyone on Hive can request help anywhere on chain with the command !HELP (it's currently not working, but "on the list").

Try it

• Try LUV (@luvshares). Just reply to someone with the command !LUV to send them some encouragement. Note, you must have 10 LUV to use this command.
• Try HBIT (@hivebits). Just type !HBIT anywhere on Hive and you'll earn 1.0 HBIT. (You can do it here.) There's nothing needed to use the command, just try it. The idea of HBIT is modeled after bitcoin where your work earns you a reward. Note, as I'm working on things, currently you can reply to anyone or yourself and you get 1.0 HBIT. This might get tweaked in the future, maybe.

Why it matters

1. To me, this highlight was personally rewarding to go from being flummoxed, to frustrated, to discouraged, but then to set a goal and achieve it.
2. I feel LUV can play a positive role on Hive as a small gift given away freely.
3. This illustrates the positives in the Hive community.