Annoyingness straw poll results

Bugabee
1

In the Dec 27 daily beemail, along with gathering Todoist beta testers, I asked for the currently most annoying bug from your personal perspective (or from a newbee perspective, in case anyone’s home for the holidays and telling your relatives about Beeminder or something).

In that poll I said to pick only the single most annoying, but before giving the results I’ll repeat the poll here, including all the write-in options people gave, and let you pick as many as you think we should prioritize:

  • The idiotic rounding [PARTIAL FIX]
  • Randomly missing graph thumbnails on dashboard
  • Graphs taking forever to generate sometimes [PROGRESS?]
  • Everything going wrong when you try to restart a goal
  • Not showing HH:MM:SS format [FIXED]
  • Fine print not publicly visible [FIXED-ISH]
  • Focus going to wrong goal when entering data in rapid succession in dashboard [FIXED]
  • Dashboard forgetting every few days that you toggled off countdowns on dashboard [FIXED?]
  • Having to refresh several times to see tab contents (datapoints, settings, etc)
  • Difficulty of changing settings for multiple goals at once, eg, when scheduling breaks
  • Reverting to deadline order in dashboard on reload (and that a single click on “goal” does reverse alphabetical sorting) [JUST ONE CLICK NOW]
  • Lack of means to organize and filter goals (want tags, hierarchies, snoozing, muting of goals) [POSTPONED]
  • No undo button for the road editor, and no snooze or uncle button for zeno notifications
  • Missing graph images in iPhone app [SAME ISSUE AS ON WEBSITE]
  • General lack of prettiness
  • Colors are all wrong
  • Lack of documentation [ON IT]
  • Having to bug support for non-legit derails [BY DESIGN!]

0 voters

Show results

Results from Beemail

In the original beemail straw poll – which only had the first 6 choices, shown in bold above – I got 44 answers. A full 21 of them were “graphs taking forever”, with some added comments like “not sometimes, all the time” and “especially with the road editor”.

No other complaint came remotely close.

Idiotic rounding was runner up with 5 votes if I count @adamwolf’s plea for integeriness (the right solution to this will solve both!).

Goal restarting got 3 votes, with comments like “tried many times, gave up, track elsewhere now” and “insta-derail when restarting do-less autodata” so, as @chelsea’s been saying, this is a bonafide disaster.

The dashboard focus bug (for people who enter data on different goals in rapid succession) got 2 votes despite not even being on the list, so that’s a big deal too.

Everything else got picked exactly once, including all the new items I added to the poll above.

PS: There are a lot of other bugs we know about. The point of this post is mainly to collect the feedback from the daily beemail straw poll.

1 Like
2

One more thing: Statistics being hidden in a tab.
A good majority of my goals are auto-data. This means the data entry form is wasted space when I view a goal

On the other hand, the “Amounts Due By Day” numbers are always important to me for planning ahead my week

7 Likes
3

I really appreciate being asked, particularly in this format. I’d suggest doing this on a semi-regular basis, as the top items are crossed off the list and new ones are added.

6 Likes
4

Thanks everyone for the votes! (The poll is still open so keep voting or letting us know if you have write-in candidates).

A few of these were pretty quick to fix:

  • Publicly visible fine print is now publicly visible!

  • The auto-sort / lose-your-focus bug/feature on the dashboard is fixed. Instead of automatically re-sorting, you just get a banner that tells you the goal is updated and you can click Deadline if you want to re-sort.

  • The first click on “Goal” on the dashboard header now sorts goals in alphabetical order, not reverse alphabetical order.

  • If you expand all your dashboard goals one by one, after they’ve all been expanded the header realigns itself so that the columns line up. Same with if you collapse them all one by one. (Not actually in the poll but useful anyway)

5 Likes
5

Ooh, approval voting.

I suggest announcing this poll in the daily beemail since it seems to be more visible there (44 votes vs. 8). Yeah, that means asking people to answer twice, but you also get a lot more information in this format than first-past-the-post (without being particularly more difficult to answer).

3 Likes
6

I’m glad this is fixed, but it doesn’t address the reasons that I cared about it, which were 1) to have the fine print more front-and-center when I am logged in, and 2) to allow clickable links in the fine print (both things that were present in the old design). I guess I incorrectly assumed they would come together.

6 Likes
7

I think we had some concern about allowing links, something about SEO and being vulnerable to spam accounts stealing page rank. I’m not sure how valid of a concern that is though.

1 Like
8

Between nofollow and/or only linking from premium subscribers, links should be fine. Adding to the finer points of fine print, it’d also be nice if we supported basic markdown.

1 Like
9

Oh, actually @bee and I worked out a policy that seemed like the right tradeoff:

So just need to include fine print for that I guess!

PS: Or maybe that was @philip’s idea and maybe we’re already doing it for fine print?

10

We may have been following that fine protocol, but lost it in the redesign. For the logged in user, fine print is currently always an edit box, i.e. no format, no links.

We didn’t do markdown processing, because most of my links [looked like this](https://beeminder.com)

1 Like
11

Missed the original straw poll, but thought I’d add that it seems that the Google log-in for the Beeminder app on Android is broken for the latest Android version. As I use the Android app more than I use the website, this is pretty annoying.

I filed a report with beedroid@beeminder.com, but basically I upgraded to a Google Pixel running Android 7.1.1.

And I wholeheartedly agree with the current top 3 (graph lag, goal organization, undo button for the road editor).

2 Likes
12

Just wanted to say thanks for the fast auto-sort bug fix; that was the fastest I’ve ever had a complaint addressed :wink:

4 Likes
13

Dashboard forgetting every few days that you toggled off countdowns on dashboard

Ended up adding a CSS rule using Stylish (chrome plugin)

.gallery .gallery-goal .doom {
display: none;
}

Now I have no countdown at all, but I can live with it (the graph has the deadline day anyway)

2 Likes
14

HH:MM format is now enabled. There’s a checkbox under the goal units textbox on the Settings tab. If the units for a goal were “hours” or some variation of that, it should be automatically checked, but you can toggle it independently of setting the goal’s units.

5 Likes
15

Just a little suggestion for the HH:MM format, maybe make it always show two digits for each unit to make it slightly easier to read. On one goal, it displays +0:11 at the top as the amount due today, but under the deltas it reads +0.19. Making it read +00:11 would probably help to quickly differentiate the two formats visually. Or even displaying seconds, since +0.19 is actually +00:11:24.

Otherwise, I love that you’ve finally added this!

5 Likes
16

Since this thread was posted I’ve noticed immediate, massive improvement in graph generation times. Is this just in my head?

If not, kudos.

1 Like
17

Random comment wearing my user hat: Lack of auto-re-sorting in the dashboard turns out to be way better! Weirdly I thought I liked auto-re-sorting before experiencing this new, less magic version. And I never even ran into the focus bug myself. It’s just so easy to click the “DEADLINE” header (now that we got rid of reverse-sorting) to refresh the sort that it’s nice having the goal I just turned blue sit there proudly at the top until I do so.

Hooray progress!

(And @are, we’re not sure! We’re kind of grasping at straws right now with the graph regeneration issue. At some point something is going to work! )

2 Likes
18

Forgot to mention this - we put up a super simple status page at https://www.beeminder.com/status. If you are seeing a graph take a long time to load, check that page - if it shows a large number of graphs waiting to be processed, then it’s expected (but still bad) that it’s taking a long time. But if it says there are 0 waiting, and your graph is still showing the flying bee, then that’s a different issue and we’d like to know about it so we can investigate further!

2 Likes
19

Thanks for the catch on the deltas not using HH:MM format! That’s fixed now.

It also pads with an extra 0 to help distinguish from non-HH:MM formatted goals, as you suggested.

And on the goal page itself, we now show HH:MM:SS at the top. On the dashboard it just shows HH:MM to save space, but the rounding should be conservative to make sure you don’t end up a few seconds short of your target!

3 Likes
20

It looks much better now with HH:MM on the dashboard! I was so confused this morning why my deltas and my current target were showing different values because it’s hard to differentiate a period from a colon at quick glance. The zero padding totally resolves that issue!

5 Likes