Some long standing bugs I would like to see resolved

Sorry, I have to disagree with you here. If I actually wanted to find and report bugs I would go to my day job where I am getting paid for this.
Despite that I did report a great many bugs here and I got very nice stickers for it and a cute hand written note. Thanks again for that!
(Stickers of which just yesterday I gave a few to some first semester students that I told about Beeminder and how wonderful it is.)
Here I am doing this because it is wonderful people behind this and because I was hoping the bugs would be resolved in a timely manner which would improve the service for me. Which – arguably – a number of them were. Such as this SVG bug.

Also because I knew this was going to be an argument by someone I was going to separate what I paid in pledges vs. what I paid in subscription.

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Does it though? To me the thread reads otherwise. And my Safari does not delete cookies when I close the browser.

All Beeminder’s users pay, or are at risk of paying, money for the use of the service. That practically is the service. So I’m not sure how the fact that you, too, have given Beeminder money means they should give your bug reports any more weight than they already would have.

Seems pretty straight-forward to me.

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Yes of course. Absolutely. But according to the export I have paid a whopping total of $442. Which… is a lot. Holy sh… Certainly a lot more than I ever set out to pay. Of which no doubt a lot, probably most of it, goes to financing support. Which is totally okay because I write them a ton of mails. And they are that rare kind of support that actually reads what you write them. Not like the cable provider kind of support.
But some of that goes towards the software side of things and quite frankly when I pay so much money for something I expect it to work rather well. Is this an unreasonable expectation? I think not.

An argument could be made that the support part of the whole Beeminder cake is indeed working really well and it is. But the entire Beeminder package isn’t, apparently. For me that is. I say that because I use Beeminder differently than most I think.

I am of course not expecting that my bug reports are handled with a higher priority.
I expect that they are handled at all :stuck_out_tongue:
Just kidding of course. They are. Like this one:

And this one about fractional values:

Which is a good bad example: The decimals bug was reported on February 5th and closed on July 9th. That is five months (+ the time before it was reported) during which it was almost impossible to enter data points that were not whole numbers.
If you lived anywhere that is not blue on this map:


(Source)

But, okay, I know it’s a small team. And I was patient and they fixed it and all is well. That one was easy to sit out because I knew in advance it was broken and would just go to the website, log back in again (Sorry), and edit the datapoint there.

Not so for the stopwatch bug. You never know how long you got until all your measured time interval just goes south without prior notice. It’s a time tracking Russian roulette. And not using that feature means to use yet another app that you have to remember opening, switching to, starting and stopping in, memorising the value, then switching to the Beeminder app where you would then add this as a datapoint (or not because fractional values (though iirc this was more of a problem when editing a datapoint vs. adding one. And the latter had an extra button for adding a “:” so there’s that).
Which is really annoying especially if you have ADHD because between all this context switching, seeing all the other apps and their updated content while switching, or just a sudden lack of concentration for just one second… well how much time were you gonna log again exactly?

You know what this reminds me of? Online banking apps in the EU and the authentication dance that comes with them.
This is really frustrating and makes you want to not use it. Especially knowing how easy of a fix it must be and that you were asked along with many other users to publicly review the app in the App Store (which, correct me if I’m wrong, implies that it would get good ratings).
Which it needs because right now the ratings are… Well, have a look:

Back to the other elephant in the room:
I am actually considering quitting Beeminder altogether at this point because if the CSV export is right – and aside from it being wrong by a factor of 100 I see no indication of it being any more wrong – these $442 have not in fact made me finish my master project in any decent amount of time. And that is my main motivation to use Beeminder. So I might as well take my money elsewhere and get an actual coach or something.

Edit: Make that five and a half months at least:

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Ooh, thank you for the new bug report about amounts and refunded amounts having inconsistent units in the CSV export! (dollars vs cents, funnily enough)

Fixed: http://beeminder.com/changelog#3173

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You’re welcome. Here is another one that has been haunting me for more than a week now and just resurfaced today:

Happens when you simply open the app. You get out of bed, start the app to see what’s up today and are greeted with an almost empty (one goal was on there) screen, then that popup thrown into your face and then the goal list filling up.

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I would think most revenues go to development, servers and integration fees. @dreev?

iirc, the expiring cookies thing involves a rails framework cookie rather than an application-level cookie, i.e. not one that we’ve intentionally set, but one that has ‘helpfully’ been set for us by some mysterious and inscrutable part of the version of ruby on rails that we’re on.

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inscrutable

adjective

1 her inscrutable face gave nothing away: enigmatic, unreadable, impenetrable, mysterious, impossible to interpret, cryptic; unexpressive, inexpressive, emotionless, unemotional, expressionless, impassive, blank, vacant, deadpan, dispassionate; informal poker-faced. ANTONYMS expressive
2 the ways of the gods are inscrutable: mysterious, inexplicable, unexplainable, incomprehensible, beyond comprehension, beyond understanding, impossible to understand, unintelligible, impenetrable, unfathomable, fathomless, opaque, puzzling, perplexing, baffling, bewildering, confusing, abstruse, arcane, obscure; literary sibylline; archaic wildering. ANTONYMS transparent

Yeaaah that totally sounds like a web framework I would trust.

No idea about the latter – I am tempted to say the server costs can’t be that high given how slow the website is :wink:
But as to development costs: You can only guess given the hours on the team page. But since @bee is the only full time dev and also does support I strongly suspect that most money goes towards the latter.

Also frankly: I don’t care that much either way :wink:
What I do care about is that lot of my money went into this service and it sure felt like it was helping me but one year later I have to say, I am still not where I thought I would be 3 weeks after I signed up.
This big discrepancy needs solving.

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phi, I only know you through your forum posts, but it sounds like you’re really frustrated with your progress on your masters project. You are even now saying it you’re progressing at less than 10% of your expected speed! Wow! That would really bum anyone out!

I don’t think anyone is arguing on the side of Beeminder having bugs. Everyone wants them gone, the founders, the support staff, anyone who uses it… but the more I read this thread, the less I think it’s actually about bugs.

One of my favorite pieces of writing about productivity is this post from Merlin Mann, “Because buying new running shoes is more fun than actually running”. I highly recommend that everyone interested in productivity or self-improvement read every single sentence.

Getting less done in 1 year than you expected in 3 weeks is quite a bit of difference! If the decimal bug would have been fixed in 1 hour, would you have made an additional month of progress? An additional week even?

Sometimes we get in over our heads, and projects start to be surrounded by indeterminate negative emotions. Instead of jumping in when you have a few minutes, we start taking on meta-projects and meta-meta projects, because they feel like making progress, and they feel good. Maybe this is switching task managers, or doing a bunch of reading, or researching the optimum sneakers to wear so you can start becoming a runner. The more we do these, the more the negative emotions around the original project grow–now it’s been two months and we’ve made no real progress! What! We signed up for a gym and bought all these exercise clothes and we still haven’t gone to the gym or lost any weight?! Now we feel even more guilty about it, and start researching therapists to see if we have an executive function disorder. There certainly can be value in reading and planning and research and self-improvement, but when it’s procrastination, it starts a pretty terrible arms race.

I used to be the absolute worst at this. I had a rough awakening sometime in my late 20s about this, and after, honestly, a few years of working on it, I felt like I was in an OK spot, and I haven’t really had any relapses of planning-as-avoidance or self-improvement-as-avoidance since then. (Now, taking-on-too-many-projects-as-avoidance is definitely something I am actively working on.)

There’s a lot of sharp people on this forum who have worked through a lot of complicated life problems using Beeminder (and other tools). Do you have a forum post where you’re looking at your progress, your expectations, what’s been tripping you up, and how to get back on track? If it’s too personal for this forum, I recommend finding someone that you can talk about it with. Having someone trusted to talk to about self-improvement stuff gives you a whole extra angle to see what’s going on, and can really level up your self-analysis and subsequent improvement. “Fish don’t know they’re wet,” and all.

Good luck! I hope you make good progress on your project, and you start to feel better about it.

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First of all, Beeminder is a productivity tool, not a personal coach service. Putting the blame on Beeminder for the lack of progress with one’s goals would be like blaming Microsoft Word.
That said, having been in the position of delaying personal (including a Masters degree) and professional goals for (literally) years, it always comes down to figuring out why you’re into this situation and what your goal really is about.

Hm, that is not at all what I meant with that. I mean service as in “willpower as a service”. Which coincidentally is one of Beeminder’s claims. Service as in “tertiary sector” kind of service in terms of economics. (In contrast to the primary sector agriculture and the secondary sector material processing for those unfamiliar with the terminology.)

I never put the blame on Beeminder. Ever. That would be stupid (in my case).
I merely observe that I invested a lot into this service with the intention of getting my master’s project (think of it as I slightly smaller Bachelor thesis) done within a few weeks.
And that failed horribly.

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Well, discussing Beeminder bugs isn’t going to write your project for you. :slight_smile:

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Huh. How did you approach beeminding the project? What goals did you create towards that specific outcome?

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I think sometimes people overestimate the size of the support team, and perhaps the amount of support that Bee does, so just to contextualise this a bit for you, currently two people routinely work on support – that’s me and Jon, with Mary as backup – and Bee is only called in for bugs/technical quirks I do not understand. Everything passes through me or Jon (or Mary as our backup) first.

That’s it. That’s the domain I as support czar rule over. Behold my mighty empire of maybe three people on a bad day when everything’s gone wrong. :stuck_out_tongue: No valuable dollars or dev hours are being appropriated for support unnecessarily!

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Thanks! Andy has seen this and is digging around a bit for it. We’re not getting a lot of reports on it, but we’re looking for it! (Bear in mind that by being on the beta, you’re much more likely to come across early-adopter bugs as we’re testing out fixes and changes!)

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Your reply was quite inspirational, thanks for this. I may indirectly have covered some of the points you brought up in the continuation of this thread: How not to beemind a thesis, a post mortem

I’m afraid it’s not a 100% reply to what you wrote but it’s long enough as it is already.

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@phi

with regard to
built-in timer getting cancelled

Out of curiosity, how long would you like to use the built-in timer? More than 10 minutes? And what have you been using in the meanwhile?

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I have one goal that takes four hours each day to do and I use the built-in stopwatch quite a lot for this.
Typical intervals are about 5 to 15 minutes as well as about one hour. Occasionally I’ll be in the flow for so long that I work two or more hours straight but I will cautiously glance at the built-in stopwatch more and more often as time goes by.

My current phone is an iPhone 6s. I was previously using an iPhone 5s on which the stopwatch would get cancelled a lot more often. It was really tedious to use it there. Presumably it has less system memory than the 6s, enough to make the kernel round up all active apps and cull them more frequently.

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