I had a writing goal that I wanted to archive because I was replacing it with a different one. I thought I had marked it for archiving to be archived on April 26th. On Sunday, I derailed on this goal because I left it for too late. Now it seems it is no longer marked for archiving.
Does derailing reset the archival flag, or did I never correctly mark it for archival in the first place?
Eek, very important bug report. We’ll see if we can reproduce this. Thank you!
PS: Reporting a bug earns you Beeminder stickers if you want them. Just let us know your snailmail address if so!
I checked the logs (more than a month later… sigh – sorry!), and there’s no record of scheduling an archive prior to the April 26th – when you first wrote this post. I can also reproduce the expected behavior – in other words that a goal that’s scheduled to archive freezes up if it derails without automatically recommitting. So I’m guessing that in this case it was in fact user error.
This is definitely the kind of bug that’s really useful to report, because there’s lots of room for confusion (and us just totally messing things up), since we’re enforcing a delay between when you initiate the action and when you get the result you want, and you’re not the first user to get surprised like this, which does make me wonder if there’s anything else going on with these kinds of cases! (Or anything else we could do to be more clear about the goal state and somehow make it more patently obvious if a goal is or is not going to be archived (and when! – I think that the current state of things where there’s no indication unless you’re on the goal page with the “Stop/Pause” tab exposed that the goal’s going to be archived is really problematic, but I haven’t come up with a solution yet!)
Bethany
Thanks! It totally could be user error, perhaps I didn’t actually press the button? I’m not sure.
Putting a distinct marker on the road near the archival date, or somehow changing colors on the dashboard would be useful to see it is actually marked for archival!
i just did a little bit of work to make the pending archive more visible / top of mind if there’s one scheduled. Both in the goal page and in the dashboard. hopefully that’ll help a bit with confusion around archiving.
There’s a light-colored banner at the top of the goal page telling you the archive date, and on the dashboard, there’s an ! next to the goal, and the archive date is shown below the goal’s name (replacing description if the goal has one, but only while the archive is pending is the description not shown).