+
+
+ Announcement: +You can now jump down as many pledge steps as you like without waiting a week between jumps. +And pledges and pledge caps don’t have to be changed separately — the right things just happen, like if you push the pledge cap below the current pledge, that starts a one-week timer for both of them to change together. +
++ (Review: +Your + + pledge + + on a Beeminder goal is how much you have at stake: +the amount we charge you each time your datapoints deviate from the bright red line on your graph representing what you committed to maintaining. +Beeminder has a core concept of an + + akrasia horizon + + , meaning you can change your mind about any aspect of your goal — including how much money is at stake, or ending the goal entirely — but any such change takes a week to take effect. +So you can change your mind for a thought-out reason but never impetuously or out of laziness. +Never akratically.) +
++ Until now (actually a couple weeks ago, when this went live) the only option for lowering your pledge was to drop it one level, starting the akrasia horizon countdown. +A week later, you could repeat that process to drop another level. +And changing your pledge cap was a completely separate thing you had to remember to do after waiting for the pledge to drop. +If you wanted to drop your pledge from, say, $270 to the minimum of $5 and make sure it stayed there, that was literally a month-long operation ($270 → $90 → $30 → $10 → $5). +
++ But now the long national nightmare is over. +
++ We do have at least one user who liked the previous status quo. +Beeminder is all about tools against temptation and so the friction of reaffirming each pledge drop could be viewed as a feature. +This particular user likes to reward themself with a pledge drop whenever they hit a long enough streak. +So they can still do that but will need a bit of self-discipline — sticking to one pledge drop at a time — that previously Beeminder gave them for free. +Since this user is wildly outnumbered by those who hated the tedium of changing pledge levels, we’re not including an + + option for spacebar heating + + . +But since this isn’t strictly a + + Pareto improvement + + , we were + + duty-bound + + to blog about it. +
++ Conceptually, the new coupled sliders for pledge and pledge cap work like this: +
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+ Skeuomorphism! +The little cowcatcher that sticks down from the yellow pledge knob means that if you physically slide the pledge value higher, it brings the pledge cap with it. +The cap can’t ever be lower than the pledge. +Conversely, if you slide the cap lower it pushes the pledge along, for the same reason, maintaining the pledge ≤ cap invariant. +
++ In reality, it’s like this: +
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+ We think it’s more obvious when you interact with it yourself, so we made a little mockup version. +Try sliding the sliders back and forth and see what they do: +
+ ++ Simple, right? +
++ This is mostly too niche to care about, but for completeness, if you, + + ill-advisedly + + , have a Beemium plan then something weird happens if you slide the pledge all the way to $0 (as only Beemium people are allowed to do). +Namely, in that special case, the pledge cap will also snap itself to $0. +The reason is a little arcane. +Remember the + + feet-wetting + + feature? +When you first create a goal you can choose to have the pledge be at $0 just for the first week, while you get your feet wet, after which it automatically bumps itself to $5. +It turns out that that doesn’t quite play nicely with the Beemium perk of allowing goals to be at $0 indefinitely. +Not the way we implemented it anyway. +This is a big part of the reason for + + deprecating + + the Beemium plan — all the confusing special cases and hard-to-anticipate interactions with other features like feet-wetting. +
++ The point being, if a Beemium user sets their pledge to $0, the feet-wetting will make it bump itself up to $5 a week later. +The workaround is to set your pledge cap to $0 to force it not to do that. +And since we don’t want a Beemium user to have their pledge go up from $0 when they weren’t expecting it to, we have this dumb special case to make the pledge cap also go to $0 by default. +You can then bump it back up if you want. +Just keep in mind that without a $0 pledge cap the pledge will always bump itself back to $5 after a week. +
+" +`; + exports[`body > post slytherin404 hash e96233337120fe417a01b12028e2d585 1`] = ` "