Arbitrary Deadlines: Buglist

Maybe this is a good spot to put a list of the known bugs and issues from the new arbitrary deadlines feature.

Open:

  • CAL Calendar app confused about deadlines (which are now the actual timestamp of doom)
  • AUD Other autodata goals (fixed RunKeeper, need to check others carefully)
  • DOW Day of the week is wrong in countdown timer for night-owl deadlines (now corrected, but disagrees with watermark, so it’s still confusing / needs work)
  • NEW Possible to get a “no data as of ‘asof’” error on a goal if you change the deadline after creating it (HT @kkyang)

Fixed:

  • ZEN Zeno polling stops at midnight for some users (still? anyone?). Known issue on Android.
  • EDT Date “walking forward” when editing datapoints
  • TOD Show time-of-deadline somewhere in gallery for Eep goals
  • TIC Tick for “data entered today” is off by one
  • DEQ Deadline says “derailing at 3am” after passed; should say “derailed! queuing”
  • RNK RunKeeper syncing one run multiple times
  • CRA Backward-incompatible change to create_all
  • PPR Pessimistic presumptive data is (sometimes) getting entered despite data being entered for today
  • AKR The week-long akrasia-proofing of the deadline field is too much
  • ASO “No data asof” error on creating a new goal
  • AND Android app is bug-free as far as we know, as of version 2.3.1r2 (minor issue with zeno polling to midnight remains)
  • IOS iPhone app version 3.1 fixed known bugs related to deadlines, and version 3.1.1 fixed the crash for iOS 7 people

P.S. This post is a wiki which means anyone can jump in and edit it.

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(I just added 3-letter codes to these so we have a stable way to refer to them in the cheering section here.)

First question: is ZEN only in the Android app or the website too? Cc @saranli.

no, ZEN is a user bugreport that they got one zeno email after midnight and no more after that.

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Sorry if I’m being an idiot (and also for reawakening a many-months-old thread), but I wanted to change my goals to derail at, say, 11pm or 11.30pm rather than midnight, but I can’t find the arbitrary deadlines option in my settings. Is it hidden somewhere non-obvious, or do I need to be on one of the premium plans to use that feature?

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Sorry about that! It’s now in reminder settings. There’s also a link to it from the countdown box above your graph. (We’re working on an overhaul of settings; thanks for letting us know we temporarily made that harder to find!)

Thanks; now I can hopefully get a bit more sleep :slight_smile:

Hi,

I just noticed that apparently the daily deadline is no longer limited to between 12am and 6am. My question is now: where is the “today” threshold? Does a deadline 3:00am count as previous day? What about 5:30am? (I now get up usually between 5:15 and 5:30 - thanks to Beeminder! - so it’s not only a theoretical question for me.)

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OK, here’s what I did: I went to the meta/uvi goal, downloaded all data as CSV and grepped for “deadline”. And I found this:
2015-09-08 1.0 7am earlybird deadlines
Do I get it correctly that goals with deadline < 7:00am are “yesterday’s” goals, and with deadline >= 7:00am are “today’s” goals? Or is it “<=” and “>”?

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(Sorry I got so behind on forum questions!) The answer is that deadlines after midnight are called nightowl deadlines and datapoints that are right before the deadline still count as what’s technically the previous day. Similarly, deadlines before midnight are called earlybird deadlines and datapoints that are right after the deadline count as what’s technically the following day. In short, the deadline is like a generalization of the concept of midnight. You’re defining when the day boundary is.

(And currently you can have nightowl deadlines as late as 6am and earlybird deadlines as early as 7am, I think. I’ve never tried anything like the latter. :slight_smile: But that’s what that UVI says so it must be true. Though I wonder if maybe pre-noon earlybird deadlines should be disallowed just to avoid confusion.)

Regardless, it’s confusing if you have an earlybird deadline say at 1pm and then 2pm datapoints get counted for the following day, but we decided that trying to mitigate that confusion would cause even more confusion. If you’re super curious you can look at the appendix of our spec where we preserved the debate for posterity.

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Noooooo! That would be very bad for my productivity!

Now that I almost never get up after 6am, and seldom go to bed after 11pm, doing as much as I can in the “productivity prime time” (5am-7am) is very important to me.

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