Hey everyone,
So I’ve been using IFTTT with my phone to beemind leaving the house more often. It’s been really successful until this past week when I’ve started getting spurious data points where leaving the location region I set up on IFTTT is firing two, three, even four times for one exit.
I’m asking here in case anyone has seen something similar before because I’m at a loss for how to go about debugging the problem.
I suppose it’s due to imprecise location. Making the area way bigger would solve this at virtually no cost - unless you have something to do at neighbor’s apartment that you want to count as leaving the house.
I’ve heard there’s also an option to set aggregation method to ‘max’. If your ifttt submits a one on each trigger then this would leave not-leaving-house days as they are and turn left-house-multiple-times days into left-house-once days. However, I couldn’t find this in goal settings, so maybe this feature is too premium for my plan.
As for debugging, you would probably want to start with ifttt logs and ‘data’ tab on goal’s page to check timings, down to a second. Did the applet run 4 times in one second, or was it spread out over an hour? If it’s the latter then that’s definitely due to imprecise location. Did the number of applet runs match the number of datapoints?
Hey thanks for the thoughts!
So in the intervening days I realized that it’s weirder than I’d realized. About an hour after I exit the zone it runs 2-3 times in rapid succession. I even played with my location services settings on my phone to see if wifi vs GPS vs Bluetooth based positioning made a difference and ???
So I think I just need to go through their FAQ and see if there’s anything else to try and if not eh I’ll figure out a kludge
Obviously, we have no control over when (or if!) IFTTT decide to trigger a location-based recipe. But if you’re only meant to be able to do this goal once per day, we can change how multiple datapoints are interpreted. As @daerdemandt says, that’s probably setting the aggregation method to max, which we can do beehind the scenes if you email support@beeminder.com