New goal road dial

It drives me batty that the New Goal screen is neither the real road dial nor easy to skip when you want to get to real road dial. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve cursed at

I’d have about 50 bucks. :scream:

Also this!!!

(but I feel like I complained about this somewhere else…)

I won’t start a new topic, but here’s a brief summary of what it takes to make an infrequently triggering cron-job style goal these days:

  1. Click “New Goal” (https://www.beeminder.com/new)
  2. Click “Next”
  3. Type goalname.
  4. Retype goalname with underscores.
  5. Look for “yearly” in “Commit to per” dropdown.
  6. Type 0 in “Commit to” box.
  7. Retype 0.1 in “Commit to” box.
  8. Type units into “Commit to” box.
  9. Select pledge cap.
  10. Type a number (e.g. 90) in “Start with” box.
  11. Retype 0 in “Start with” box.
  12. Click “Pledge $5”
  13. Click “Update”
  14. Click settings
  15. Retype goalname with spaces/capital letters/hyphens
  16. Change rate units to yearly.
  17. (Optional: Change pledge cap to 2430).
  18. Click “Save Changes”
  19. Type the yearly rate you wanted into road dial.
  20. Click “Dial-it-in”
  21. Type “1” into data entry and hit “Submit”.
  22. Click “Retoratchet” tab
  23. Type the number of days you want until derail
  24. Click “Retroratchet” button
  25. Wait up to 24 hours to get the “Reminding you about $GOALNAME” email so your goal will become integery.
  26. Now your goal is up and running.
2 Likes

Very grateful to @drtall for careful documentation of suckiness! This was shortly before the redesign so if you’re up for updating this…

Sure!

  1. Click “New Goal” (https://www.beeminder.com/new)
  2. Figure out that the grey plus button is “Next” and click it.
  3. Click the same grey plus button again (it means “Do More” this time)
  4. Select “per year” in dropdown
  5. Type the yearly rate you want.
  6. Type units you want.
  7. Click “Continue”
  8. Enter slug
  9. Click “Continue”
  10. Click “Finish”
  11. Click “Go To Goal”
  12. Wait up to 24 hours to get the “Reminding you about $GOALNAME” email so your goal will become integery.
  13. Now your goal is up and running.

So that’s definitely an improvement!

Perhaps off topic but the re-design introduced a lot of inconsistencies with the naming of Goal slugs and titles. The API defines the terms slug and title which the old UI also exposes and I have always presumed to be canonical. The new UI refers to the slug as “a short goal name” and also as “goalname” (no space). It refers to the title as “description” which is particularly unfortunate because the only place “description” appears in the API documentation is as a definition of fineprint.