I’m offering a bounty to Beeminder for making a lane width (“Absolute lane width” under Settings for custom goals) of 0 work reasonably. The bounty starts at $100 and will decrease by $10 each time we enter a new calendar month (so in October it will be $90) until it reaches $20, where it will stay indefinitely. (I reserve the right to revoke it entirely with 1 month’s notice after it reaches $20.) The requirements are:
- Safe days should be computed as the actual number of days after which the goal, according to the current road (and taking pessimistic presumptive reports into account) would derail if no data were entered
- This should apply to everywhere safe days are used, including off the top of my head:
- text on dashboard
- colors on dashboard
- text on goal page
- colors on goal page
- text in Android / iOS* apps
- colors in Android / iOS* apps
- zeno polling (by email, SMS*, Slack*, Android & iOS* apps, and anything else I’m not thinking of)
- API (I actually don’t think there is anything in the API that exposes “safe days” per se, but if there is it should work reasonably)
- graphs for these goals should shift the safety lines horizontally (by a week) from the actual road, not vertically
- until a week after this is posted, I reserve the right to add anything else that I realize needs to change for using zero lane width for every goal to make sense
* I don’t actually care about iOS / SMS / Slack, but it would be weird to make this work for the others and not these.
Reasoning: at least a half-dozen times I’ve broken a goal (generally using the road editor, but occasionally with some combination of retroratchet, autoratchet, take-a-break, etc.) and the explanation usually boils down to “yeah, it would have worked the way you thought except for lane widths”. I’m sick of dealing with them.
If anyone agrees, please help by raising the stakes.