One thing that may help here is if we did a better job of conveying that anytime you go off track and we’re about to take your money, we email you. Just reply to that email if the derailment wasn’t due to akrasia (or however we’d convey that to newbees) and we’ll make sure you aren’t charged. If users trusted that [1] that might go a long way towards solving this problem.
Deprecated was the wrong word. It’s just tucked away in advanced settings to make clear that you shouldn’t set goals to auto-quit unless you understand what that means. Automatic rerailing is, we’re convinced, exactly what newbees need so they don’t derail once and then procrastinate indefinitely on getting back on the wagon. (And of course if you do want to quit, just hit the red Archive button. The real point is that quitting should be super easy to explicitly choose but shouldn’t be the path of least resistance. That’s our hard-won insight about the psychology at play here.)
Smart. Of course “terrifyingly advanced settings” signals this pretty well. We just need to reorganize what things are in that section.
Excellent advice, as always!
[1] And they can! We now have @greatandrandom, @quintrino, @mathir25, @mel, @jill, @pjh, @chelsea, @bee, @alice, and me all chipping in monitoring support@beeminder.com from all around the globe so we can jump on spurious derailments and answer questions.