Ooh, sorry we dropped this at the time but it came up again. Namely, @shanaqui was wondering if there’s a technical reason for that 6am-7am gap other than to make the cutoff between earlybird and nightowl deadlines more clear.
The answer is kind of messy.
Here’s what we said in the original blog post about arbitrary deadlines:
You can’t currently have a deadline before noon. We’ll be changing this but for now the interface isn’t good enough to make clear the distinction between, say, a 6am earlybird deadline and a 6am night-owl deadline. I.e. all morning deadlines are of the night-owl variety.
And here’s an excerpt from the original spec:
Night Owls vs Earlybirds
How do we distinguish between someone who wants a 6am end-of-day because they want to be able to pull a beemergency all-nighter and someone who wants a 6am end-of-day because they want to be forced to dispatch their beemergencies before breakfast? They’re both choosing 6am but they mean quite different things. It will be made obvious by picking the deadline via a slider:
[6am ---- 9am ---- 12pm ---- 3pm ---- 6pm ---- 9pm ---- 12am ---- 3am ---- 6am]
If you slide past midnight then a little footnote appears below the slider:
(Night-owl mode! After midnight so technically the next day, which is fine.)
If you slide before noon then the footnote is:
(Earlybird mode! Dispatch your beemergencies before breakfast.)
Webcopy for confirmation of a deadline before midnight (or maybe just an FAQ unless we can make it more concise than this):
WARNING: A deadline before midnight counts as the day boundary, even if it’s in the morning. If you manually add data for a given day then we respect the date you specified (though if it’s an emergency day and the graph has already derailed then it’s too late, the data’s accepted but won’t undo the derailment). If autodata comes in after the deadline then it’s displayed and plotted for the following day.
NB: To simplify the initial implementation we’re not going to allow earlybird deadlines before noon.
Flash forward to the present
(Aside: Note the huge spec no-no there, “or maybe just…”. We’ve gotten better at specs since then. Specs are about making all the decisions, not proposing options! Anyway.)
At some point (UVI#1661) we decided that pre-noon was fine. Then later we accidentally lost some help text webcopy that’s on our list (gissue #58) to put back:
Time of day that this goal will derail if it’s a beemergency. Allowed range is 7am - 6am (NB: Deadlines from 7am to 23:59 are Early Bird deadlines; midnight to 6am are Night Owl deadlines, meaning technically the next day, which is allowed).
I’m not sure how well I’m answering the question here! I’m mildly frustrated with my past self over all that but at least I feel like we’re much better about such things now. Progress!