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Here’s a collection of feature requests from the straw poll in the last daily beemail about beeminder.com/breaks. Thanks so much for all the brilliant feedback on this!

  1. Show the current rate for each goal – useful in deciding how much break to take.
  2. In goal settings, autoratchet uses both a checkbox and a field. In megabreak it’s just a field and you have to know to clear out the field to turn it off. Not sure which is better but it would be nice to be consistent.
  3. Turn the max safe days (aka autoratchet) back on after the break is up or at least show what it was previously set to. “I always forget to do that after a break and it always ends up biting me.”
  4. Would be nice to have a confirmation dialog to help spot mistakes. “Like when I mindlessly hit the go button without actually changing the date ranges.”
  5. Ragged right edge is ugly. @philip’s suggestion: set the width of the “set the [weekly] rate to” bit to the widest one and center that column.
  6. Being able to check ALL the “break” boxes (and then uncheck the ones I don’t want broken) would be utterly delightful.
  7. Same for the date ranges, like setting one goal’s range and having the rest default to that range. A lot of users have argued pretty passionately for this! (gissued)

And here are some previous important bug reports / feature requests, just to get this all collected in one place:

  1. Bug report: If I click repeatedly on a column to alternately sort it ascending and descending, the second click does nothing. That is, the first click sorts on that column; the second click seems to have no effect; and the third and subsequent clicks reverse the order of sorting. [confirmed! (gissued)]
  2. What happens if there is already a break for that period? Maybe it would be nice to know that I just picked a date range that intersects (time-wise) an existing break?

And just for warm fuzzies, let me excerpt the initial reactions to us showing off the first version of this to the daily beemail folks back in January:

  1. “:pray::raised_hands::pray::clap::raised_hands:”
  2. “Aw yiss. Starting off 2020 strong!”
  3. “Kudos to y‘all for making this :slight_smile: I think it’s a good decision for reducing the workload for support AND as a bonus it gives the people of Beeminderland some more tools to play with.”
  4. “Great feature! … and I just scheduled all my China trip breaks this morning without it, one by one. Well, next time!”
  5. “This is amazing!!! <3 <3 <3”
  6. “This is almost exactly what I had been imagining for a ‘schedule all the breaks’ feature: I do indeed want to go through and consider each goal individually, because I rarely do breaks on everything, e.g. even when I’m on vacation I still want to keep track of my water consumption. But having it all on one page is wonderful.”
  7. "Yeeeessss! I’ve been waiting for this for so long.
  8. “About your point regarding considering each goal separately: I’m 85% certain this will allow me to be more thoughtful about scheduling breaks, not less, since the only way I’ve had to get through scheduling breaks for a trip on all my goals in any reasonable amount of time has been to get pretty mindless click-click-type-click-repeat about it.”
  9. “Yessssssss”
  10. “Nice. I like that we’ve preserved the goal-by-goal evaluation, just removed the number of clicks.”
  11. "So exciting!!! I’m so happy!! Yay!!
  12. “Very awesome that the break scheduler even lets you adjust max safe days and weekends off! That will be incredibly helpful even if you’re not taking a break.”
  13. “Beeminder will be near-perfect once this and half-plane are done!!!”
  14. “I’m definitely in favor! I like that it preserves the think-about-each-goal but makes setting breaks much less arduous for those with 20+ goal.”
  15. "SO EXCITED!!! MY DREAM HAS COME TRUE!
  16. “This made it super easy to do my weekly dial today!”
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Did you miss mine about being able to set a default start and end date?

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Oops, that definitely deserved to be its own item [fixed now]. I had it glommed onto #6 about checking all the break boxes at once and unchecking the ones you don’t want breaks for.

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Let’s find a better phrase than ‘current rate’. There was a lot of confusion in the forum because someone meant the end-of-the-road committed rate, which might not be what’s currently going on, because of other breaks and slope changes adhering to the akrasia horizon.

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We could say “current setting of the ‘rate’ variable” to eliminate that ambiguity.