I know everything in here has been said before, but just to get it in one place:
The Road Editor is almost a great premium power-user feature, but actually using it right now is difficult and frightening. On one side are “road can’t get easier in akrasia horizon” errors, which don’t explain why Beeminder thinks I’m making the road easier (and I almost always disagree with it), and on the other side are mistakes that make the road harder (in a way that can’t be undone) or even insta-derail me.
Between these is an infinitesimally small target of edits that don’t change my road within the akrasia horizon at all, but change it in the past or >7 days in the future. I’m almost always trying to hit that target, and I almost always fail unless my edits affect only the future at least 7 days out. If I do manage to edit my road in approximately the way I want to (I frequently just give up) it’s by making the road a tiny bit harder within the akrasia horizon just to get rid of the (IMO inaccurate) “road can’t get easier in akrasia horizon” errors.
I understand that you want to redo the road editor to be graphical and shiny and all, but can we please get these in the meanwhile:
An “I know what I’m doing” button that lets us disable akrasia horizon enforcement temporarily for a goal with >7 days of safety buffer;
An undo button that we’re always allowed to use (not just when the road is broken).
@BeeminderStaff, FWIW I’m just about at the point where a road editor that worked well would convince me to make the Infinibee —> Bee Plus leap, but I’m aware thanks to discussions like this that it isn’t worth it yet. A +1 for prioritizing improvements.
Yes please god an undo button. I don’t use the road editor at all because I invariably (INVARIABLY) have to email support because I instaderailed myself. I’m a reasonably smart person! I work with computers intensively for my day job! But the road editor defeats me every time. hangs head in shame I know when I’m beat.
Really good feedback here; thank you! @bee and I talked about it and agree it needs to happen but it turned out not to be a totally simple matter of enabling the same undo button she wrote for when you break the road. That’s because we need to decide like a window of time or something for undoing. If you break the road completely then there’s no such issue. It’s broken, we remember the last good state, undo any time! But if you just edit the road and then come along next month and hit that undo button, that might make a mess.
I mean, probably a simple solution will be fine. Maybe when the page loads the undo button is disabled, so you can only undo the last thing you did immediately but even reloading the page you lose your chance.
Maybe too harsh but it avoids any messiness with time windows, etc, and is a drastic improvement over the status quo. So probably we’ll do that shortly! Click the to encourage us to do so!
The road editor does submit ajaxly, so this “undo doesn’t persist across page loads” might be reasonable. Maybe store the original road in localstorage or such, then there’s not really danger of pushing the button e.g. after a recommit, and then re-derailing yourself.
I’ve got lots of ideas of things to make the road editor nicer, but I’m especially excited to fix the issues with changing rate segments also changing the width of the road!
to encourage us to do so!