Subject:
killing beeminder’s autoquit feature, ie, making precommit-to-recommit universal

(We’re sending this to the 2170 Beeminder users who have the autoquit feature enabled on any of their goals. And just in case you forgot, Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth, where you keep all your datapoints on a yellow brick road to your goal or we take your money.)

You know how when you derail on a Beeminder goal, the yellow brick road adjusts to your current datapoint, you get some extra safety buffer, and you’re back on the hook at a higher pledge amount (or the same amount, if you hit your pledge cap)? Well we used to have a way to disable that and have your graph automatically freeze if you derailed. That was a terrible idea, partially defeating the point of Beeminder. Clearly you should at least have to explicitly click something if you want to end your commitment. Which is how it’s been for a long time.

Except you’re getting this because at least one of your goals has that autoquit feature enabled. The idiotic part is that for a long time we were mistakenly enabling that every time anyone chose to archive a goal. So restarting an archived goal meant that it would mysteriously freeze on you every time you derailed. If that was the case for you: good news! It won’t do that anymore.

But in case you really wanted it to do that for some reason, well, please hit reply on this email and tell us why so we can, um, try really hard to convince you that you don’t want what you say you want? We have whole blog posts about this, and can cite books on behavioral economics. And we’ve worked hard to obviate the reasons you’d naturally be nervous about precommit-to-recommit (like “what if I literally die and you keep charging my credit card?”). Also we really like arguing. And if we fail to convince you… well, we’ll work something out, or at least offer you stickers as a consolation prize!

In short: Turning off the autoquit feature on all goals, hit reply if that’s bad. (Or if it’s good — we like hearing from you!)

Thanks so much for beeminding!
Danny and Bee of Beeminder

PS: Not to be confused with our auto-canceling premium subscriptions, still very much a thing.

PPS: Here are your affected goals, some of which may be archived and you don’t care but just in case:

<% obj.goals.nondeleted.where(:autowuss=>true).each do |g| %><%= g.shortname %> <% end %>

$BMSIG