If you derail on a “do less” goal do you restart at zero or are you in the hole for all the extra data points? For example if I allow myself only one icecream cone a day and I then eat five in one day and derail, do I start the next day at one or negative four? (assuming “no mercy” rule is in effect.)
Thanks
Answer: You don’t start in the hole, even with no-mercy. We have a strong anti-ketchup ethos in Beeminderland.
Great question; thanks for asking it!
PS: I’m not sure the link I included is that relevant to the question. It’s more about why you can’t squirm out of a derailment by catching back up. In any case, Beeminder is all about staying on track every day, never having to do more than a day’s worth at once. So if you dig yourself in a hole you get stung but then you start fresh.
I think this is the right default: every time you derail you start over at zero, with a “clean slate” so to speak. This corresponds very well to the importance of self-forgiveness. However, it can also sometimes create a bad incentive to binge—for example, once you have eaten two ice cream cones, you have already derailed and can’t make it any worse, so you might as well eat sixteen. This has been discussed a bit here: When I’ve already derailed . If that’s a problem for you, probably the easiest solution is to add some fine print to your goal saying that you have to count data points past derailment towards the next day (though you have to edit them manually).
Related anecdote: a few years back, Mark Forster was dismayed to find that we let him “off the hook” with regards to his original goal, every time he derailed. But I do believe that there’s huge benefit in starting from where you actually are, not where you would have been had your goal gone to plan.
That surprises me. I don’t know Mark personally but I thought he was a big fan of “quarantine and track separately” for backlogs. In Beeminder terms that would translate to keeping the original goal “off the hook” and the creation of a new short-term goal to Beemind the catch-up.
Yes, quarantining is Mark’s most excellent method of dealing with a backlog of things that you might actually want to progress. I think there may be some subtle differences between quarantining a backlog and re-railing, say, a weight loss goal. Though arguably both of them, in some senses, preserve the progress to date.
If we were all paragons of logical consistency, we might not need Beeminder!
Aside: obviously, we also like the idea of beeminding your progress through that backlog. (If your backlog happens to be in gmail, you can label the relevant items and automate the data feed.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I also don’t know Mark personally. I may live in the UK, but it’s a big (little) country! 
Yeah I suppose you are right that for odometer goals (be they Do More or Less) it is kind of tricky. 
What I’d love is an option to “insta-derail” and reset (which I believe has been discussed in the forum before?). I’d like the ability to say: okay, I screwed up, but now my binge is OVER. So the goal would no-mercy re-rail from whenever I hit the reset button. That removes the issue of having to wait until the next day with no accountability, or needing to manually track points over the derail threshold.
Yes, I have heard this called the “uncle button” before.
I personally like this idea of insta-derail. Since you are talking about a “binge”, it is probably about do-less goals. What I dislake most is that beemider on all my devices continues to remind me of having to do something about the eep! - when it is about a goal that is undoable… (no matter if this is about a real derailment or about the loophole where tomorrow’s allowance will consume it)
Well, maybe this is issue of mine can be addressed with a wiser setting of notifications on my side rather than with a new function 
I have already set zeno to -1 day on the web for such goals where I may derail only after deliberately entering something (rather than “driving” into the YBR and beyond by not doing anything). But the android devices are still making much noise on such days…