Should autodata goal creation back-fill the past week of data?

I propose that when you create a new autodata goal, Beeminder should fetch the last week of data and show it to you like this, where your actual bright red line doesn’t start till today, when the goal was created:

image

Advantages:

  1. It reassures you that autofetching works
  2. It gives you guidance on how to dial your red line, since you can see what you’ve averaged over the past week
  3. It’s consistent with the rule we want to adopt/universalize, that every autofetch syncs the last week of autodata, treating the autodata source as ground truth

Open questions:

  • If there’s no data to fetch, it might look weird? Would it be too magical to set the tmin (aka x-min) conditional on if there’s past data to show? Probably. Dynagraphs may make such questions moot.
  • Should step 1 be to make sure we do this consistently and correctly for all autodata integrations without showing the pre-creation week (ie, tmin=today) and then we can worry about the tmin question? This one is pretty much answering itself.
  • Would something similar to this be nice for restarting archived goals?

PS: You can already make your graph look like the above example for some autodata goals just by setting your x-min (aka tmin) to a week before you created the goal.

PPS: Or better yet, go to graph.beeminder.com and just zoom out a little. :heart: :chart_with_upwards_trend:

2 Likes

Not all data sources let you do this. I think I like it for ones that do, though!

1 Like

on the one hand, consistency is good…

on the other, we used to try to import history for most autodata goals and we thought it was a great idea etc etc, but

  1. lots of users complained about this. They want to start at 0 for some reason? Maybe fresh-start related? (i’m thinking specifically of fitbit steps goals. maybe it’s more a "i’m not used to cumulative graphs sort of problem?)
  2. we had lots of bugs with it. mostly troubles with getting vini adjusted correctly without derailing along the way or something
  3. it adds complexity in that you need to add a “setup” functionality for every autodata integration to deal with the vini setup issue.
2 Likes