What are the technical reasons for the incompatibility between autoratcheting and weekends off?

[shanaqui]

@lanthala

Oh man, I had NO idea that beeminder wasn’t aware that the autoratcheting/weekends off incompatibility was a real problem

I wouldn’t say “Beeminder” doesn’t know, but I didn’t.

[lanthala]

(FWIW, on the sidethread of “what can we comfortably ask support to do”, and also on the sidethread of “making support do a lot of work is a great way to push a feature forward”, I currently – and on the explicit advice of support! – ask support to schedule all my all-goal breaks, because I am both confused by the break format, and think having to set breaks in a dozen goals is hellish.)

[narthur]

Honestly, though, Beeminder must have the best support of any company in America. It’s ridiculous.

[drtall]

@shanaqui

But it’s nonetheless true that I’ve worked for Beeminder a year and this thread was my first real notion that there was a problem here.

I sort of envisioned that you had a whiteboard full of my complaints on it at the Beehive. Just kidding, what you said makes sense.

@shanaqui

My feeling is that the way to make us feel a need to prioritise this in any way would be to turn on autoratchet and weekends off…

Unfortunately I can’t because the features are premium, so I can’t use them as-is. And I’m not willing to buy premium given the state of these two features. I think your suggestion would work for free features, but there’s a circular dependency when considering premium features.

Put another way, your next paragraph is my fear:

@shanaqui

Potentially the answer in the end would be “those two features are irreconcilable and you will get a message saying so if you try to turn both on”

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@shanaqui

If the MVP works for 99% of people, the answer is that the MVP was sufficient.

Given perfect data I would agree with you, but I think the gatekeeping thing discussed above as well as The Cockroach Principle | Beeminder Blog make it difficult to have confidence that a feature is actually being adopted and used as you expect? I’m genuinely curious 1) what fraction of premium users with access to weekends off use it; 2) what fraction of all Beeminder users would use weekends off if they could.

[shanaqui]

@drtall

I sort of envisioned that you had a whiteboard full of my complaints on it at the Beehive.

Possibly there is… I’ve never shared physical space with any other workerbee but Alys, so far!

As for actually analysing how people use the features, it’s a bit above my pay grade – I’m mostly talking about how you’d get support to advocate for something to be fixed, I guess.