Our first release of recurrent tasks in Freedcamp had a bare minimum to get you recurring. 🙂

If you set a task to repeat every Monday – we create a new task every Monday. We ignored start and/or due dates set by you and a new task did not have these attributes set. The reason – it became very confusing both to implement and, most importantly, to explain to you – our users. In software development, you cannot just create things for typical use cases only – it must work broadly and more importantly – be logical and clear.  If you edit an old task which started on May 17,2017 and ended June 5th, and decide to make it recurrent on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (today), what pattern should the original start/end dates follow? In this case it is very unclear.

However, creating a new task on a day most users expect it to start was too late, and many users asked why they cannot see all the recurrences. I will start with the latter question.

Why we do not create all the recurrences straight away as we do for events?

The reason we do not create all recurrences straight away is:
– Tasks are shown not only in Calendar where the time frame is limited to one month, but also in Tasks application.
– Tasks in Tasks application will be crowded with hundreds of recurring tasks if you, or your users don’t apply special filters to hide future tasks.
– Lots of repeating tasks, especially with a high frequency of recurrence like daily or weekly, create a lot of clutter in your projects.

What can be done to create a new recurrent task visible in advance so it appears on your radars – Homepage, Daily Recap email, email notification sent days before it needs to be started?

Now we create recurring tasks in advance; as long as the new recurrence falls into a time interval of the next 7 calendar days from today, but no more than 1 task per day will be added.
We also set a due date to be the date we pre-created this task for, so you can see these upcoming tasks in the Calendar, Daily Recap, Homepage and receive an email notification for a person assigned to the new task being created.

Example: assuming today is June 8, 2018 (Friday) and you set these tasks a while ago:

1. You have a daily task running all days except Saturday and Sunday

You have a task for today (Friday) and a new task was created today with the due date on Monday, June 11. Tomorrow (Saturday, the 9th), Freedcamp will create a task for the 12th with the due date set as June 12th etc.On Sunday, 10th June Freedcamp will create a task for 13th June with due date set to 13th June.

2. You have a weekly task repeating Monday

Since it is Friday, Freedcamp created a June 11th task for you 7 days ago, on June 5th. On June 12th (Tuesday), Freedcamp will create a new task with a due date of June 18th.

3. You have a task starting on the 15th of each month

Tomorrow, June 9th, Freedcamp will create a task with a due date of June 15th.

Please contribute here with further suggestions as to how we can improve recurrent tasks.