Feature Request: Integery goals

Ah I think that is also true for Odometer goals (reading – drtall – beeminder).

1 Like

It seems that the bare-min is not rounded up (when integery is enabled) if you have too many days until derailment. See for example beeminder
vs beeminder

1 Like

Tried it out

  1. set integery on
  2. goal has more than 7 days for derailment: bare min still has decimals
  3. retroratched to less than 7 days: bare min now has no decimals :smile:
3 Likes

I think it also messes up the display on the summary page. It doesn’t match what is shown on the goal page and actually neither is correct:

2 Likes

Can we get the integery setting added to the settings page? I just created a new goal and having to re-remember how to set it via the API every time is kind of tedious. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

@drtall integery is on the advanced settings page for any custom goal.

“every time” seems like it’s a candidate for adding to default goal settings. (Yet another example of something that’s goal-set-up settings vs goal-usage reminder settings, for defaults.)

1 Like

Wait, does that mean you need premium for this? Because that would be absolutely insane. I’ve pre-written the rant in case of “yes”:


I have 28 active goals and 21 of them need integery. I’m in another thread helping @heraclitus63 and they have 2 goals and both of them need integery. I am curious what the stats are for everybody else.

If I’m actually representative here and integery is more common than not, I would argue it ought to be on the Basics page. If I were king of the world, I would make all the timer apps report time in seconds rather than hours and then default integery to on for all non-weight goals.

What I would not do is tell people, new users and veterans included, that getting Beeminder to be less of a [quote=“lolernie, post:3, topic:1263”]
engineer/programmer/sentient robot type of thing
[/quote]

requires premium. I would not do this because:

  1. It’s already hard enough to attract newbees. The graphs and math are already very nerdy. If you have to click Terrifyingly Advanced to get Beeminder to stop asking you to floss your teeth 0.17 times today, I don’t think it’s going to happen often.
  2. Everything in the New Goal UI makes Custom Goals sound scary. What is so scary about not wanting to be talked to like a sentient robot?
  3. This continues the discouraging pattern of Beeminder premium features being work arounds / bug fixes rather than features. integery is a Category B feature from that post. I will not pay money for it.

EDIT: Updated stats since I created a new integery goal.

4 Likes

A post was merged into an existing topic: Feature Request: Segregate goal-defaults from reminder-defaults

I currently have 39 goals, 21 could be integery (although I don’t have the setting turned on for most of them.)
2 are fractional and the other 16 are time based. (The handling of time based goals is a whole other subject.)

2 Likes

I think we’re in violent agreement. Thanks for taking the time to lucidly rant, @drtall

I didn’t mean to imply that anyone should sign up to premium for this, or that it’s right that integery currently only becomes visible for custom goals, etc. I apologise if it came across differently. It just happens to be exposed in the settings page for folks who are already premium and have made their goal custom.


In the same way that not all of the ‘advanced’ settings actually are that scary, not all of the custom options are equally dangerous, etc. That whole area needs a review and a rejig. The recent reminders revamp included a lot of cleaning up behind the scenes, iirc, in order to make such a review easier to do.

I think you’re right that integery is the expectation for a lot of goals. (About ⅔ of mine, as it happens.) Maybe not the default, but there’s an awful lot of folks counting discrete units, not datapoints on a continuous scale. It should be easier to state that expectation when starting a goal.

But ‘integery’ also needs to work better throughout. This forum thread prompted me to enable it on a bunch of my goals, and they still ask me to do things like read 2.5 emails before bedtime. All that stuff also needs to be addressed before we inflict it as a recommended setting to newbees.

1 Like

Oh no! If you feel like you owe me an apology then I owe you one. My post was meant to be of the form “Thanks for those facts, @philip, now let me complain about these facts.” as opposed to complaining at you. Sorry!

2 Likes

I figured that if my initial reply triggered a rant, I might have inadvertently stepped on something. I’d say I’m sorry, but I daren’t risk the universe collapsing into a singularity of mutual apologies. :smile:

2 Likes

I have ~35 goals. I have one goal that is obviously not integery–weight loss.

I have a variety of goals that are “time-based” (minutes spent doing whatever) Half are in minutes, half are in hours. I would prefer if they were all in minutes and yet were intelligent enough to report lots of minutes as “hours and minutes” or even “days and hours and minutes”. If that were the case, they would all be intergery (although, I suspect that a “timey-wimey” flag would be set instead of integery, if they worked as well with times as they do in my wildest dreams.)

For the non-weight-loss goal, and non-time-based-goals, all of them should be integery, but I am waiting to switch them over.

5 Likes

My stats: 25/39 active goals are integery. 14/39 are timey-wimey.

2 Likes

If I’ve done my maths right, that means between me, @insti, @adamwolf, and @byorgey we have 141 goals of which 4 are neither time/integery ?

EDIT: Updated stats since I created a new integery goal.

2 Likes

That seems right–but remember, we are almost certainly not “normal” users :smile:

2 Likes

Wouldn’t that make it more likely that the ~2% of odd goals is an over-representation and the “normal” users will have fewer? Making @drtall’s point even more applicable.

2 Likes

It should be possible for @dreev or @bee to run a query on the database and find how many goals have only ever had integer or time based datapoints entered and calculate the percentage.

2 Likes

Could be interesting! Although I bet it is just a lower bound since entering non-integer values into integery goals is a classic weaseling move.

Also, thanks disqus:

Sorry everybody. :open_mouth:

2 Likes

Very possible. I suspect the non-integeryness is a
conceptual/implementation artifact from starting with weight loss.

3 Likes