Merry Christmas everyone, looks like you have all been good this year as the bot is back online.
Unfortunately the changes steemit made to their API broke some of the bot functionality, which meant the bot would no longer work properly.

I was hoping to fix it earlier but due to me @thevillan moving house and having to sort everything out, I really did not get the chance to sit down and re develop the bot.
These changes steemit made could not have come at a worse time for me.
So I spent part of my Christmas rebuilding the bot today, as far as I can tell everything looks good and is ready to go. I could not find any faults from a few test runs and I'm confident we are back in action.

The bot will run in a couple of hours, so let's hope everything goes well and things don't heat up to much of santa wont be able to deliver his gifts.

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Let's just do a quick recap of how the bot picks it's winners.

### How are winners picked?
 
The winners are picked based on some selection criteria. @steeming-hot is about rewarding and promoting good content as best it can, so if your posts don't pass some basic checks you won't be picked.
The criteria selection process:
💩 You must be a follower of @steeming-hot.
💩 Your reputation must be above 25.
💩 Your post must have 1000 characters or more, and the bot won't count HTML, images or links. They get stripped out from the character count.
💩 Your post must be less than 4 days old.
💩 Your post can't have already been resteemed by @steeming-hot, makes sense.
💩 Your post must not have been identified by @cheetah as possible plagiarism.
💩 Your post must pass checks made to the global blacklist API.
💩 Your post must not be categorized as NSFW.(Let's keep it clean folks)

If you don't meet the selection criteria, you wont be picked.
You can read more about the bot [here](https://steemit.com/steem/@steeming-hot/steeming-hot-service-rundown)