Beeminder Forum

IFTTT sending repeat data to my goals

Akrasia
#1

Am I the only person seeing this? FYI if not. Situation:

  • Many of my goals record completed Tasks in Todoist. The data gets to BM via IFTTT applets of the sort “IF Todoist task in category X is marked completed, add 1 datapoint to Beeminder goal Y”

  • On three dates recently (Nov 19, 21 and 22) IFTTT went wild and REsent data from Todoist tasks it had already processed and sent for dates going back to mid July. This dumped over 100 “new” data points on each of those days into several of my goals.

  • I checked my Todoist activity logs for the affected categories - TD did not resend that data. The IFTTT applet activity logs did show it sending all those data points on those dates.

Result: I had to do massive manual cleanups, deleting every erroneous data point. This sometimes resulted in an immediate derailment on a goal for which I legitimately hadn’t kept up but because that was disguised by the extra duplicate data I had not received any warning that I was close to derailing.

I am paying for IFTTT Pro. All of these manually created applets existed before they started the pro requirement. I’ve sent a message to IFTTT about this - will report back if/when they reply.

If you use IFTTT to send data to your goals, do a quick eyeball check of your graphs for a sudden vertical jump on one or more days!

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#2

What’s the source on these goals? Are they all Todoist? What does it look like on IFTTT in the “activity log” for those goals?

I have quite a few IFTTT goals, but most of them are from Beeminder to Beeminder, and they all look fine. (I do not have any Todoist goals, though).

I’m curious to hear what IFTTT says!

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#3

The source of each goal is Todoist - each goal is collecting data from one Todoist Project’s task completions. So for example: Todoist Project “Clutter” has several Tasks: “Resolve a clutter item”, “put away laundry”, etc.

IFTTT applet says “If Task in ‘Clutter’ is completed, add 1 data point to Beeminder Goal ‘Cluttercut’”

The IFTTT activity shows that on the days it happened, IFTTT thought it had been triggered 100+ times by ‘Clutter’ tasks being completed. However, the Todoist activity log does NOT show it completing 100+ tasks on those days.

The Beeminder Goal data Date column shows the date IFTTT sent them as the date shown in the IFTTT activity log (so 100+ data points for 11/19/2020), but in some of the Goals I have IFTTT include the Date/Time Completed info from Todoist in the Beeminder Comment field. So for the repeated data sent I can see it originated from Todoist tasks done weeks or months ago (and correctly delivered at that time), e.g.
Date Comment
2020-11-19 November 13, 2020 at 10:12PMResolve a clutter item
2020-11-19 September 1, 2020 at 08:40AMput away laundry

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#4

First response from IFTTT:
------ Forwarded Message --------
From: The IFTTT Team (IFTTT) support@ifttt.com
*Date: 11/30/2020 11:15:40 PM *
*Subject: Re: On November 19, 21 and 22, IFTTT applets I have co… *

Are you confident these same items didn’t get added back to Todoist via another automation or service?
TTThanks,
Everyone from IFTTT

I replied:
I am - all of the Todoist entries are done manually by me via the iOS app, and the Todoist activity log does not show them being entered again after the first time I completed them. Also, this problem has not recurred since those 3 dates it happened. All of the multiple entries included data from Todoist stating the date on which Todoist logged them, which were dates spanning literally months. If Todoist resent them it did not do it in any foreground method that was visible in the logs I can see.

For example, here is a screenshot of the Todoist activity log for November 19 on which I completed 6 tasks: [screenshot showing that]

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#5

Have you had support do anything to your goal recently? Like right before you noticed the duplicate datapoints?

I ask because I remember a while ago I was having trouble with duplicate IFTTT datapoints and it turned out, I believe, to happen whenever support needed to make certain kinds of changes to my goals, including changes to the road (like inserting a break or fixing a not-legit derailment).

Does any of that sound right to you?

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#6

Nope - no changes to either goal. Good to know though!

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#7

Hmm… that was my best guess. I haven’t seen this particular thing happening on my own goals except when there was a change made from within the admin panel so I’m stumped. Let me just call @dreev in on this one!

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#8

I don’t think it’s a Beeminder issue - I can see IFTTT’s activity log pumped out all those repeated data points. So waiting to see if they have any ideas.

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#9

Update FWIW: Never heard back from IFTTT. The issue has occurred again several times. So now when I notice it has happened I just ratchet my road to get rid of the effect of all the extra duplicated data. And after the most recent time I’ve started setting auto-ratchets on the goals getting affected - ~7 days so far, but will probably tighten that on ones where that’s too generous for motivation.

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