I entered “2000” as target value and have previously done the text box click dance so that the goal end date was the greyed out text box.
Assuming this would then be set to a value calculated from the rate and that target value I hit enter.
And then Beeminder exploded:
Goal is here:
Oh @shanaqui, greatest and only support czar, what have I doneth?
If you look at the auto-calculated date, it’s 11th May, so it’s the “implied goal date is in the past” condition. 
Indeed! But why did it do that?
And who thought having that wall of text with "\n"s in the “absolute minimum amount of stuff to be done” box is a good idea?
I’ll have to plead lack of knowledge on \ns. I’m also not sure what this graph is doing because it’s an odometer graph and it’s pulling in data that looks like it belongs in a do-more graph – I’ll come back and look again if nobody’s sorted it out in the meantime, during my actual working hours! shanaqui.commits.to/figure_out_phi_goal
Sure no rush!
I’ll leave this goal as it is for now. So someone can debug it. Totally not because my acratic self gladly takes this opportunity to not have to actually do that goal. Nope. Totally not it. 
So to start with something that’s making me scratch my head a bit: it’s an odometer goal, and the values being entered are more in line with a do-more goal. For URLminder to work, it needs you to work in the same document, and not remove words: it just reports the total it sees each day. It looks like it picked up 1769 total one day and 153 total (not +153) the next. Is that what you’re expecting?
I don’t know why the goal is calculating your finish date like that, because there’s no way you can have reached that by the date it says with your current data. So that I’m actually turning over to someone else, probably Bee, to figure out!
(Sidenote: MIC means “minimum inhibitory concentration” to me. So in my brain apparently this goal is about figuring out the minimum antibiotic required to kill off your spiht goal. 
)
The data and numbers all look sane to me, re odometer vs do more. Urlminder just counts up all the words at all the urls you point it to, so that 17xx number could have come from either counting up the words on an html error page if the URL happened to be unavailable when we tried to fetch it for counting at some point, or if there were 1700 words at that time, and then they got deleted before the next check.
The error message is slightly confusing. It’s never good when you get a bee-brain-level error :\ – The rate of the road is 450 per day. The road derailed 2 days ago and reset to close to 0. So at that rate, the current road would reach a value of 2000 in about 4 days. When you change the rate or value in the commitment tab you’re changing it in one week, which means the road’ll actually be at a value of about 3200 when the change takes effect. Which means you’re telling it “Starting at 3200, increase at a rate of +250 per day until you reach a value of 2000.” which will never happen… or rather it happened in the past… it’s confusing. ideally we’d just catch errors like that before you submit the road. but anyway, just explaining what’s wrong.
