Bug? Enabling "weekends off" on a Friday

Bugabee
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I was just allowed to enable weekends off on Friday and it was activated for tomorrow. In effect, it made my horizon easier which is not supposed to happen, for example if tried to do it with the road editor the system would not allow me to do that.

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Yep. That’s by design.

I think the lenience started out because it’s usually on a Saturday that you wish you’d enabled weekends off, but that’s within the akrasia horizon for the next weekend, which means that you couldn’t schedule it to start until two weeks out, which really sucks.

Or imagine creating a new goal mid-week, deciding that it’s a weekday-only goal, but not being able to make that be true yet.

For simplicity and sanity, we eliminated the usual constraint. Shout if you find yourself tempted to abuse this feature.

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Not tempted so far
Just thought it might be seem incosistent to some users.

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Thanks for the explanation! I want to raise my voice to say that this is a pretty serious loophole, and one that I’ll personally be tempted to abuse! It means that late in the week I can trigger a nearly-immediate break in any of my goals, and that seems like it violates the whole spirit of Beeminder.

I also wonder why it can’t be treated like deleting goals, i.e., why not allow the immediate weekend off for 7 days after the goal is created, but then past the 7 day window it only creates weekend breaks after the akrasia horizon?

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Just wait until you learn about moving deadlines!
Exploiting loopholes violates the whole spirit of Beeminder. :smiley:

q.v. The Type Bee Personality | Beeminder Blog

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Valid! I very much refuse to lie to Beeminder, because then what’s the point? Using an as-designed feature to trigger an early break doesn’t create the same revulsion in me, but maybe it should? But then, why does “no excuses” mode exist? Should everyone just be Type Bees and not need it? Should no one need an akrasia-obeying “weekends off” toggle?

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I think it might be to help folks avoid the slippery slope of ‘just this once’ excuses made in reply to a legitimacy check email.

They’ve done the right thing in the moment and admitted to the graph that they hadn’t met the commitment, but their overnight brain whispered to them all the reasons why it had happened and why it was so obviously inevitable and totally not their fault. :smiley:

“No excuses” hard commits them to treating derailments as legitimate.

If it’s intended as a permanent change to the goal commitment, then maybe it’s different in kind.

You’re unlikely to toggle ‘weekends off’ off again, so it’s like a door or road marked ‘one way’. There’s also some mental friction in having to rethink your committed slope in terms of per-day amounts and that there are now only five days in a week.

I have a number of ‘work’ type goals with a deadline of 8pm and most others end at 23:59 (effectively midnight, but always shows the right day of the week in the UI) — every now and again I find a goal that ought to have a different deadline and change it at short notice. But it’s a permanent change to how the goal ‘should’ have been configured, so doesn’t feel like abuse.

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