Allow single number replies to BeeBot
When the BeeBot queries me it asks for a reply in the form of goalname dayofmonth datapoint. It seems to make sense that the default reply should simply be: datapoint. In this case the default value for goalname would be the goal that triggered the BeeBot query, and the default value for dayofmonth would be today.
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Rich Armstrong commented
I often reply with data from my iPhone, which entails bringing up the number/punctuation keyboard, putting in the day of month, then a space (which causes the keyboard to go away), then bringing up the number keyboard and putting the data in.
It would be lovely to be able to put in something other than the space, like an ampersand, that would not trigger the keyboard to go back to alpha. :)
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
Here's the current biggest reason we're still hesitating on this: For goals like weight loss it does often happen that people forget the date, and it does seem like it should be obvious that "152" is really "^ 152" [http://beeminder.com/faq#qcut]. But for goals that are binary -- did my workout today or not -- it often happens that people specify the day but forget the number. Like:
31 "got my last workout of the month in today"
when they meant
31 1 "got my last workout of the month in today"
See the dilemma? :)
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
The main reason for our slowness on this is that email is such a nightmare, even with Mailgun doing the hard work for us. If we're too liberal in what we accept as data in email replies then various crazy things in people's email signatures end up getting parsed as data. A common solution to that is the "reply above this line" trick.
Please keep upvoting this if it bugs you and we'll figure something out eventually!
See also http://beeminder.com/faq/qcut
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Glenn Willen commented
You could limit it to the case where the most recent datapoint was for yesterday. Then it's pretty unambiguous: Whether they mean "the next datapoint" or "the datapoint for today", it's still fine. This is probably the most common case.
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Adminbsoule (Admin, Beeminder) commented
We've gone back and forth on this several times. It is not infrequent that someone tries this and then it turns out once they correctly add the datapoint that they didn't mean "today" at all -- still, it is probably a reasonable little bit of magic, and lots of people try to take this shortcut, so it would probably also be appreciated.