At times, it’s helpful to encourage the use of a form or a task template to enforce structured input for new tasks, thereby discouraging manual task entry from scratch, which can lead to non-standard or incomplete task data.
For example, forms are a way to specify required fields in tasks. Task templates can be used to default custom fields, add dependencies, add subtasks, and multi-home, for example. Manual task entry will not be able to enforce any of these things
Business or Enterprise plan users can remedy this a bit with a custom rule to help to flag manual task entry. One way to do this would be to make use of a custom field that the task template or the form sets. The rule trigger would be “Task added to this project” + (two triggers required) “[custom field name] cleared”. The action could either be “Add a comment” (like “You must use the form/template instead of manual task entry”) or “Complete task,” or both.
That wouldn’t handle the case that a user making a manual task entry set the custom field explicitly, but it would help much of the time, and it does automate the auditing of new tasks. (You could also make the triggers more explicit by specifying multiple custom fields if more than one is required.)
Maybe that will help improve the quality of your structured task data.
Larry