This is really important; thank you so much for bringing it up! I’ve been talking to @bee and @galtsubery about this [1] as well. It’s not enough to push data with a cron job or use other workarounds, for a few reasons:
- We want Beeminder’s refresh button to auto-fetch data, as you noted, just like for official integrations
- Zeno polling – need new fetch right before sending each new alert on eep days
- If you’re down to the wire you don’t want to be derailed by network delays or delays on Beeminder’s end
For #3, for official integrations, Beeminder is smart about this. It knows what time the autodata fetch was scheduled and it counts the data for that exact time even if the deadline has technically passed by the time the data is fetched and the graph processed. This is true even for the final check at exactly the deadline. So if Beeminder can initiate the autodata fetch for 3rd-party integrations then those integrations can have that important feature too.
Beeminder being all about coming down to the wire, that’s more than a nice-to-have. (:
[1] Context: @galtsubery’s brilliant beemind.me discussed here: