Does anyone have an "upratcheting" script?

I use weekends off on almost all my goals. One side-effect of this is that I find myself frequently running into the issue where I really want to use retroratchet on one of my goals, but I can’t because it will mess up my breaks. Being able to use retroratchet has turned into the exception for me.

I tried using the visual road editor to do it, but ended up messing up my road.

I tried asking support to do it for me, and they very kindly did once, but then informed me that it’s actually harder for them to do it than it is for me.

So… long shot… has anyone written a script to do this that I could use? Basically trim safety buffer by shifting the road from now forward up, instead of shifting it to the left, so that all breaks stay firmly in place.

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Eek, have you asked us to fix the messed-up road yet? We’re definitely happy to do that!

The issue with us putting in retroratchets is that you have to rely on whoever does it being able to math out where you want your road to go. You could end up with some really amazing weirdness when the person doing that mixes up their 1s with their 7s. (ahem)

For doing a retroratchet in the visual road editor, first it helps to get an idea of how it looks when you just do a normal retroratchet (this screenshot is actually from the road editor premium users get access to):

First a road entry (14 here) gets added to tell the graph where it was before the retroratchet. That stops the graph moving for previous days (without it, you’d get a slope up to the new value instead of a step up, and could derail yourself in the past). Then a new higher value (in the case of a do-more graph) gets added, to move the road up on the exact same day, producing the step.

So I load up road.beeminder.com, editor mode, pick the right graph, and then double-click the graph on the point for today, to get that first road-entry that says where the roadslope was before I do any messing about. Then I click on “ins” to insert a new road row, set it to the same date, and add a higher/lower (whichever makes your road harder) “value” to create the retroratchet. As e.g. here, where I added the highlighted rows:

The reason this is easier for you than for us is you can see a preview of how it looks and not save it if it’s doing anything silly. The editor we use does not sanity-check us before it submits – whatever we save, it just does.

NB: I used two different graphs to demonstrate here – my /re-catalogue goal for how a normal retroratchet works, and /francais for how to do a manual one in the visual road editor.

Also, I should say that obviously the correct thing is for Beeminder to just make breaks stay put when you ratchet, but I’m not sure how technically difficult that is and when that’s coming.

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