Goal-creation preferences defaults

I’d love to have some way in BM to store preferences when first setting up a goal. I know that every time I set up a goal, I:

  • set it to private
  • set the charity where I want money donating
  • make changes (always the same) to the graph settings
  • make the values integery (custom-setting)

I do this every time, and because of the weird way the ‘settings’ tab is concocted, you can’t make all of these changes all at once. The changes described above require something like 3 or 4 separate clicks to “update goal”, “update privacy”, “update graph” etc. If you try changing them all at once, the changes which aren’t part of the pane you click to update will all be lost.

I guess this is going to be low down the priority chain, but probably something other power users might like? (I guess it’s possible with the API?)

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+1. This is exacerbated for me because I don’t make new goals all that often, so I frequently forget things I would have liked to set.

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I’m idly wondering whether we could do this by each user having a prototype goal that we replicate as the foundation for new goals, rather than the current setting-by-setting version for the few options that currently exist.

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To take this further (at the risk of derailing the thread) - we’ve discussed the idea of making any goal clonable to your gallery. So if you saw someone’s step goal and were inspired, you could press the clone button and bam, now you’ve got one too.

That may or may not be more trouble than it’s worth in @strickvl’s use case. To address your original post, @strickvl: you should be able to set the privacy of new goals in your New Goal Defaults tab. We could probably pretty easily add a default charity there as well, and that feels like a natural thing to put/find there. The integer-y-ness of a goal doesn’t feel quite as right to put there, like it’s being singled out somehow, but I could be convinced that maybe we should have all the settings there too. What are the graph settings you wanted to change?

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Picking this up, an awfully long time later, the things I do to almost every goal I create:

  • make it integery (custom)
  • set the charity
  • set it to private
  • turn on the rosy line and turquoise swath

At least some of it is possible if you create the goal using the API, as you suggested. I have a bash script for do-more goals that sets most of the parameters I want. I have to turn on the turquoise swath manually (I can’t recall if that’s because the API doesn’t allow it or because I’ve been too lazy to work out how to do it in the API). I should browse through the API docs again.

Here’s my script if anyone wants it, with parameters set for a do-more goal to track calcium intake. It’s extremely basic and you’d want to check all the parameters and certainly not assume that I’ve set it up perfectly, but this might save you a bit of setup time if you wanted to do something similar. Replace “YOUR_…” in five places.

#!/bin/bash

slug=calcium
title="Food Intake: Calcium"
rate=2000
runits=d  # d=days, w=weeks
yaxis="cumulative total mg"

curl -X POST --include 'https://dreeves-beeminder.p.mashape.com/users/YOUR_BEEMINDER_USERNAME/goals.json?auth_token=YOUR_BEEMINDER_KEY&username=YOUR_BEEMINDER_USERNAME' \
  -H 'X-Mashape-Key: YOUR_MASHAPE_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -H 'Accept: text/plain' \
  -d 'datapublic=true' \
  -d 'ephem=false' \
  -d 'goal_type=hustler' \
  -d 'goaldate=2012310000' \
  -d 'goalval=null' \
  -d 'initval=0' \
  -d 'panic=54000,' \
  -d "rate=$rate" \
  -d 'secret=false' \
  -d "runits=$runits" \
  -d 'steppy=false' \
  -d 'rosy=false' \
  -d 'coasting=false' \
  -d "yaxis=$yaxis" \
  -d 'pledge=0.0' \
  -d "slug=$slug" \
  -d "title=$title"

xdg-open https://www.beeminder.com/YOUR_BEEMINDER_USERNAME/$slug
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