not a newbie, or averse to jargon - I think it helps explain things without needing sentences of explanation each time - but some of these still confuse me, and i’ve never bothered to look up what they mean. I tried to explain them as I understand them without reading the messages above or the glossary.
“ratchet”, “autoratchet” also retrorachet: All to do with changing your commitment to give yourself less leeway but I’m never sure how or why they differ except auto means it happens by itself if some other criterion is reached. (Reading rest of post: yes, just use ratchet for giving yourself less leeway, and auto ratchet for doing that magically if you get to what you’ve already declared to be too much leeway).
“road dial”: a more general version of changing your commitment to other than straight lines, I know there’s a web interface for this but have never used it. (post glossary reading: ok, it’s the name for the normal straight line editor too, I hadn’t realised this).
“mercy”: can’t think where this is used, except in relation to no-mercy if you are weaselproofed. (post glossary reading: yes, only “no mercy” is covered but it’s for the no safety buffer recommit,)
“weaselproofing”: setting yourself up so you can’t easily renege on a commitment, this is one I feel makes perfect sense, but I’m a native English speaker and I’m not looking bemusedly at a search page full of woodland animals.
“akrasia horizon”: my favourite beeminder concept, the idea that current-you can tell future-you to not do things next week but current-you has to abide by what past-you decided was best last week. I think “akrasia” is the core concept of Beeminder and it’s the one new word worth learning (I know you didn’t make it up but you introduced it into my vocabulary).
“autodata”: data added to beeminder from a third party source by magic, no manual entry required.
“beemergency”: really nice neologism that describes you needing to do something as if it were an emergency, but just because beeminder says so.
“rerail”: actually not sure, is this like getting back on the road, in which case, transport system oxymoron? opposite of derail I guess, which has never occurred to me as being an odd thing to do from a road before now though! (Reading the glossary, yes, derail and rerail are obvious opposites now I think about it, but rerail didn’t mean anything to me by itself.)
“aggday”: all the numerical data points you add in one day get added up to make the total of how much you did today, they don’t overwrite each other.
“maxflux”: don’t recall seeing this before and can’t think what it means
“legit check”: beeminder’s email to check that you really didn’t do the stuff you said you would, before you get charged.
“pledge”: how much $$$ you will give to beeminder if you don’t do the stuff
“yellow brick road”: the yellow part of a beeminder graph where you are fulfilling your commitments. I understand it,I think it’s a cute name but I still don’t really like it or think it really fits but I think it’s probably too ingrained to change now.
“getting stung” didn’t get mentioned, which I like a lot.