How to change goal address

Hi,

Could you please help me and let me know how I can change goal address (short title): https://www.beeminder.com/michalj/goals/3.

I would like to change this “3” to something else.

1 Like

Sadly a premium plan is required to rename goals. Alternatively you can always delete and re-create the goal, which basically works except that your pledge will be reset to $5 (or $0 if you have freebees left).

1 Like

If you ended up calling it “3” because of a mistake or confusion with our interface – which you probably did if you were trying to name the goal something like “3 workouts per week” or somesuch – then we’re happy to change it for you if you email support@beeminder.com. It’s a long story why we don’t normally let you change goal URLs without a premium plan…

1 Like

I think I’ve always been of the opinion that the New Goal page’s behavior of silently truncating the slug following the first space character, combined with zero indication that the slug is immutable, is a pretty awful trap.

4 Likes

Maybe replace the whitespace with _?

1 Like

Even just omitting whitespace would be better than truncation IMHO.

2 Likes

What’s worse is that even if you explicitly set a slug, modifying the title at all sneakily modifies the slug back to the ‘first word only’ version. :cry:

5 Likes

The solution is to type the slug into the title field, and correct the title after the goal is created. Nobody should have to know that.

4 Likes

I’m pretty sure we tried that once and it turned out to be worse.

Slugs became really_really_long_in_some_cases. Also, with no sign of them being immutable, they became a naive_and_mildly_embarrassing_reminder from the past, before you understood the actual goal (and Beeminder) as well as you do now.


Two things:

I think there’s a desirable and not-too-hard #UVI in don’t touch my slug.

And here’s an enormously long discussion about what might be done about the situation to make slugs, titles, goal statements, and everything work better together.

1 Like

I don’t recall there being any changes / experimentation on the slug creation process since I joined Beeminder, so I guess this was a long time ago?

I would argue that if Beeminder is going to put any effort into this, they should just work on making the slugs mutable. That’s the real root cause of all the pain here. Everything else about the New Goal screen being sneaky is only a problem because they are immutable.

1 Like

Thank you for advice. I decided to write email to support.

Looks like 3 years…

https://twitter.com/beemuvi/status/291303175280029696

We were recently reminded that it’s not just our own incompetence and technical debt that makes this hard. For example, IFTTT recipes will break if you change a goal’s slug. In other words, immutability of slugs is in some ways a feature. But it’s possible to get the best of both worlds, or at least much closer than we’re currently getting.

1 Like