Revamped revamped reminders

The reminders have been tweaked again (Previous discussion: Revamped reminders)

Leave your feedback/reactions/bug reports to the changes here.

Changes I love:

Locks gone from goal settings (pledge cap/no mercy).
Goal deadline can now be found under basic settings.
There is a Webhook URL for reminders.

Changing default no longer affects existing goals.

3 Likes

In the daily beemail, @dreev suggested

We’re hoping to approximate the best of both worlds by having a button to overwrite a goal’s settings with the global defaults. So to change settings for lots of goals you’d change the global defaults and then you’d still have to go hit that button for each goal.

Rather than a coarse-grained button, I’d much rather see an orthogonal settings page where I can adjust a particular field across multiple goals simultaneously. Heck, even if that’s presented as a single field for the setting value and a bunch of checkboxes to update (or not) individual goals, that seems super-powerful.

3 Likes

2 posts were split to a new topic: I’m getting multiple Zeno reminder emails!

@philip this is done now:

2 Likes

Yes and no! That page does the job for alerts, and looks beautifully compact in comparison to some of its predecessors.

My vision for the arbitrary orthogonality of settings is that we could specify and apply any setting across a subset of goals. e.g. what do my pledge caps look like, or my auto-ratchet max safe days, or…

In the fully general case, it’d even include complex things like being able to apply breaks across multiple goals. And it’d be nice to be able to sort by the field value as well as by the goal slug and/or name.

Of course, none of these wishes are related to the topic… :slight_smile:

3 Likes

“As software matures, it asymptotically approaches Excel” - David Yang @dy1

Not that that’s a bad thing necessarily in this case.

2 Likes

Point taken, though I really do not want us to build a single universal spreadsheet of settings, rather to have the ability to pull any single setting into an all-goals view. By ‘single setting’ I suspect that I also mean groups-of-closely-related-settings, of course.

2 Likes

Where do you indicate that a goal should use the default settings? I can’t find any buttons, etc for that anymore. I tried changing my default settings, and it didn’t seem to change the goals that were set to default before.

1 Like

Yes. exactly! That’s the revamped revamp, because too many folks were getting caught out by unexpected side-effects of changing globally-applied defaults.

So now, the defaults only apply to new goals at the time of creation, and thereafter each goal’s settings are independent and potentially unique.

That’s in part why Andy updated the massive page of goal-specific alert settings (pictured above), so that you could tweak each goal’s reminder settings all in one place.

2 Likes

I appreciate that they are all in one place. That makes things much easier to change than before the first revamp.

What I would like, if not too difficult, is one more column of “use default” checkboxes in the table of goal specific reminder settings. It would be on the left, and, whenever the “use default” box is checked, the options in that row gray out and follow the default options. Options in that row could not be manually changed in the table until the “use default” checkbox is unchecked again.

Would that help with the problem of unexpected changes?

1 Like

That’s something like what we had in place.The surprise comes from the intense focus that we humans tend to have when changing things.

e.g. the couple of times that changing my defaults bit me, it was because I was changing the defaults with a particular subset of my goals firmly in mind. I inevitably forgot about other goals that shouldn’t be changed in that same way. This was made worse by the fact that we’d conflated reminder and other goal settings, and by the fact that I’ve currently got 40+ Beeminder goals…

One thing that @dreev proposed in the daily beemail was to put an apply defaults button on each goal, possibly exactly where you’ve described, so that it’s easy to copy ‘universal’ settings when that’s the right thing for your goals.

2 Likes

We actually have that now in Terrifyingly Advanced settings, a button to overwrite a goal’s settings with the defaults (as opposed to permanently have a goal inherit its settings from the global defaults, which, as @philip explained, was a usability disaster). That’s probably a pretty inconvenient place to have it and it would be nice to have such a button for each row in the table. Except it’s more than just reminder-related defaults so that’s super confusing… :confused:

1 Like

And nice to have only one save button on that page or both buttons saving all changes? I haven’t checked this since the last revamp, but I’ve lost changes before by not clicking on the correct save button.

1 Like

If you start to make changes and then try to leave the page without saving them it should yell at you. If you found a place where we fail to do that we’d be super grateful for the bug report. That’s super frustrating as a user, especially with a big complicated form!

I don’t try to leave the page, which is probably why that warning doesn’t get triggered. I just make changes to the defaults on the first half of the email settings page. Then, on a roll, I change something goal-specific on the bottom half of the page. If I click “Update Defaults,” then the top half gets saved and the bottom half does not. If I click “Save Goal Specific Changes,” then the bottom half gets saved and the top half does not.

4 Likes

Thanks so much for explaining this. Yeah, two submit buttons on one page is a disaster and we should’ve known better. Tagging #UVI

1 Like