I bet there’s a way to have the best of both worlds but just turning it green isn’t the right solution. Even though there are plenty of cases where the goal has intentionally ended, the more common case and the case we care about a lot more, is that you unintentionally let the goal end and so it’s by design that it’s all red and in-your-face to induce you to restart it (or archive it – to make an explicit decision about it one way or another).
I think in the future when the UI ensures that a goal would never have ended in the first place unless you very explicitly wanted it to, we can add fireworks or confetti or whatever instead of a garish red FIN.
(I know this feels like an unsatisfactory answer for the power users here in the forum for whom an ended goal is always absolutely intentional.)
Some relevant principles:
PDP says we won’t throw the intentionally-ended use cases under the bus (not without blogging about it at least! which, to be clear, we have no intention of doing and I have plenty of finite-time Beeminder goals myself, like for reading books)
I thought about end date as a hidden fuctionality that you must explicitly enable, how people are managing to do it by mistake? Maybe it is the root problem?
Nope. As things currently work, every goal has an end date, even if it’s 10 years in the future. Technically, Beeminder currently doesn’t support truly open-ended goals.
And since ratcheting (loosely) moves the graph to the left, it effectively moves the end date of the goal up, meaning that you can accidentally end your goal by ratcheting in certain circumstances (it’s happened to me).