# What do the colors actually mean?

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/what-do-the-colors-actually-mean/2518>\
**Category:** Bugabee\
**Created:** [September 19, 2016, 7:57pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/what-do-the-colors-actually-mean/2518 "2016-09-19T19:57:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 21

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**Author:** ![kenoubi](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/kenoubi/32/842_2.png) [@kenoubi](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/kenoubi)\
**Post date:** [October 1, 2017, 5:43pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/what-do-the-colors-actually-mean/2518/21 "2017-10-01T17:43:02Z")

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Addendum: Beeminder is actually inconsistent with itself about colors! When you load the goal page for [https://www.beeminder.com/kenoubi/bike](https://www.beeminder.com/kenoubi/bike) (for example) the HTML returned says `<span class="doom blue" data-doom="2147306399">`, but then the Javascript doom counter immediately changes it to green. The behavior of the `updateDoom` function is responsible for this (IMO better) behavior.

@dreev @bee Would you consider just changing the API for `roadstatuscolor` to match this code (from the Beeminder Javascript that updates the doom counter):

```javascript
  function doomColorClass(doomStamp) {
    if ($(".goal-panel").data("coasting")) {
      return "green";
    }
    var doomDate = moment.unix(doomStamp + 1);
    var now = moment();
    var diff = doomDate.unix() - now.unix();
    var days = Math.floor(diff/(24*60*60));
    if (days < 1) {
      return "red";
    } else if (days < 2) {
      return "orange";
    } else if (days < 3) {
      return "blue";
    } else {
      return "green";
    }
  }

```

I don’t think this would be very hard. The field appears to be undocumented, so it shouldn’t break anyone who’s only using the documented API.

That would fix it everywhere… in the meanwhile I have some hacky Javascript that works for the web, but I can’t do much about mobile. (Actually, I’m not even sure whether mobile uses `roadstatuscolor` rather than recomputing the color itself… but it _should_ use `roadstatuscolor` 😛)

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