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.
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In the daily beemail, @dreev suggested
Weâre hoping to approximate the best of both worlds by having a button to overwrite a goalâs settings with the global defaults. So to change settings for lots of goals youâd change the global defaults and then youâd still have to go hit that button for each goal.
Rather than a coarse-grained button, Iâd much rather see an orthogonal settings page where I can adjust a particular field across multiple goals simultaneously. Heck, even if thatâs presented as a single field for the setting value and a bunch of checkboxes to update (or not) individual goals, that seems super-powerful.
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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, orâŚ
In the fully general case, itâd even include complex things like being able to apply breaks across multiple goals. And itâd 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⌠
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âAs software matures, it asymptotically approaches Excelâ - David Yang @dy1
Not that thatâs a bad thing necessarily in this case.
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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 âsingle settingâ I suspect that I also mean groups-of-closely-related-settings, of course.
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Where do you indicate that a goal should use the default settings? I canât find any buttons, etc for that anymore. I tried changing my default settings, and it didnât seem to change the goals that were set to default before.
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Yes. exactly! Thatâs 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 goalâs settings are independent and potentially unique.
Thatâs in part why Andy updated the massive page of goal-specific alert settings (pictured above), so that you could tweak each goalâs reminder settings all in one place.
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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 âuse defaultâ checkboxes in the table of goal specific reminder settings. It would be on the left, and, whenever the âuse defaultâ 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 âuse defaultâ checkbox is unchecked again.
Would that help with the problem of unexpected changes?
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Thatâs 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 shouldnât be changed in that same way. This was made worse by the fact that weâd conflated reminder and other goal settings, and by the fact that Iâve currently got 40+ Beeminder goalsâŚ
One thing that @dreev proposed in the daily beemail was to put an apply defaults button on each goal, possibly exactly where youâve described, so that itâs easy to copy âuniversalâ settings when thatâs the right thing for your goals.
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We actually have that now in Terrifyingly Advanced settings, a button to overwrite a goalâs 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). Thatâs 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 itâs more than just reminder-related defaults so thatâs super confusing⌠
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And nice to have only one save button on that page or both buttons saving all changes? I havenât checked this since the last revamp, but Iâve lost changes before by not clicking on the correct save button.
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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 weâd be super grateful for the bug report. Thatâs super frustrating as a user, especially with a big complicated form!
I donât try to leave the page, which is probably why that warning doesnât 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 âUpdate Defaults,â then the top half gets saved and the bottom half does not. If I click âSave Goal Specific Changes,â then the bottom half gets saved and the top half does not.
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Thanks so much for explaining this. Yeah, two submit buttons on one page is a disaster and we shouldâve known better. Tagging #UVI
1 Like