![](https://steemitimages.com/p/C3TZR1g81UNaPs7vzNXHueW5ZM76DSHWEY7onmfLxcK2iPJpaxU2CpJPBGN9eSp2g69jDVYWZSGNb8qaZzJHedEFpAZ8Ae8EjrL9zZomSG19cEFENsMejeN)

It's been a while, but behind the scenes working on a few things. I figured I'll give an update on what's new.

## Posting Fee Functionality

New functionality built in allows for enforcing posting fees before a post is accepted for visibility / payout. How it works if enabled is that a post is muted upon creation, and is un-muted if either 
* Posting fee paid to fee account with `@author/permlink` as memo (same format as promotion)
* or Beneficiary set to designated account higher than certain threshold

Note that when an individual post is in a muted state, votes will come in and can still be counted (e.g. voting power is consumed and rshares will be distributed to the post), but if the post is still muted at payout time, it'll be treated as a 'decline payout' post. Meaning, post rshares will still be counted in 'recent claims' for `pending_rshares` computation, but author, voters, beneficiaries will not be paid (e.g. portion corresponding to this post will return to the reward pool).

If a tribe is interested in this functionality, please contact me for details, as there will be changes to the frontend and splitting of costs involved.

## Individual Post Muting

Posts can now be muted by the tribe account. Send a custom json with:

```
 id:  "scot_mute_post",
 json: JSON.stringify({"symbol": "TOKEN", "authorperm": "@author/perm", "mute": true}), 
```

from the tribe account and the post can be muted / unmuted. Muting will remove it from showing in feeds, and prevent it from paying out. Posts can still be directly accessed.

Comments should work too, though I believe there may be a little bit of work to have those be hidden in threads, but it should be a quick fix in the frontend.

## Comment Deletion

Before, deletion of comments was ignored by scot bot, now it is actually respected, and the post entry is deleted as well from scotbot.

## Bug Fix for Promoted

There was a bug with a post that lingered on promoted even though it had already paid out. Now promoted feed will filter out paid-out posts.  Thanks to @rentmoney for the bug report. 

## Reminder About AutoClaim

Autoclaim has been running fairly smoothly, if your tribe wants to use it, do let me know and I will enable your tribe for autoclaim. See [this post](https://steemit.com/steemdev/@eonwarped/scotbot-autoclaim) for details.

## Miscellaneous

I've started poking around with the SMT testnet, to see how a nitrous instance could potentially be linked to it. That stalled a bit as I was unable to link to a votable SMT with emissions yet. But I have a good idea of how to do it now, once we can set one up on the testnet.