I’ve experienced this a few times – I go to the breaks page, there is the “Default break dates” at the top that are populated based on the current date. E.g., right now it’s Dec 27 (around noon, so no weird day-boundary edge cases should apply), and the fields are autopopulated with Jan 3=>Jan 10 (i.e., 7 days from now and 14 days from now).
When I go to set a break using these default values, I get the error message “Start date can’t be before akrasia horizon (2026-01-03)” (e.g., see screenshot), and if I change to Jan 4 then it works.
What time zone are you in? That may be relevant if the problem is from a conflict between what the Beeminder server thinks is the current date and what your browser thinks.
We have an example in Bee’s queue right now where I was able to set the default breaks in the UK timezone and someone in a different timezone, on the same day, could not – so timezone is a solid guess. That said, midnight hadn’t passed in GMT as far as I can tell, so it’s not something straightforward about timezone. We’ve also seen it happen where people have custom deadlines, where some goals are affected and others aren’t… but the goals in the example we have didn’t have custom deadlines.
So overall it’s a weird one that we are aware of and have a few examples of, but if anyone can help us narrow down where the edges are, it might be useful!
It works as expected for me. I am in Europe, 6 hours ahead of the server (IIRC that your server is in EST); it’s the same calendar day for both my computer and the server right now. My goals have standard deadlines.
Not just midnight, of course, because of goal deadlines confusing everything. The piano-3 goal above uses the default default of 3am.
But I do remember having to be wary, when I was a support bee, of making certain changes to goals for, say, Australian users.
And not that it applies at this time of year, but the semi-annual timewarp periods always made things behave strangely — Australia/Europe/North-America all change to/from DST on different dates.
