So many different confusing things going on in this thread but let me try to at least give some quick reactions to some of the things:
- For now (and the Yellow Brick Half-Plane project is about to make this more consistent) colors should just indicate number of safe days. If it’s Friday and you have weekends-off and you’ll have a beemergency on Monday, you have 3 days of buffer and your goal is green. There’s a sense in which that’s really 1 day of buffer and orange, but Beeminder should not try to be clever about that.
- At least not yet. We have another project in the works (for some definition of “in the works”) called True Breaks where scheduling a break, including turning weekends-off on, means a literal gap in the yellow brick road where there can still be datapoints plotted but it doesn’t matter what they are. When that’s deployed we can consider whether it makes sense to be smarter about the colors and how we count safety buffer.
- Our current implementation of weekends-off and what happens with future scheduled breaks when you ratchet and how these things all interact is a minor travesty and we are definitely working on that. Mary has dubbed it the Playnice Project internally, as in, “making different features play nice together”.