Task rules were paused on a project, but this was not done manually by either of the project owners or task collaborators. How may this have occurred? I am not able to see these changes reflected in the task activity log.
Hi @Mikaela_Sanford , this is expected behaviour if the person who initially created the rule (irrelevant to the subsequent people who may have edited the rule later) has either been:
- removed from the project (which contains their rules) and no other member is in that project
- removed from the team (which contains the project which contains their rules) and no other member is in that project of that team
- deprovisioned/removed from the organisation
You can read more about this in the Asana guide here
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Hi Richard,
If a user is removed in error and re-added, is there a quick way to restart all the rules they have set? The rules apply to ~20 projects so manually restarting each rule will take some time.
Thanks,
Jen
Hi @Jennifer_Sheehan , unfortunately not to my knowledge. I believe once a rule is paused, the only way to reactivate it is manually for each one.
Unfortunately it is cumbersome if you have loads but I believe it is expected behaviour for security reasons. But with a bit of team work, how about you send out a team message asking each project owner to go into their projectâs rules to enable the ones that are paused?
In case you are on an Enterprise plan you could also use the recent Bundles feature to simply recreate the same rules into your ~20 projects. But then you would opt to manually delete the old rules.
Lastly, one way of avoiding this happening again, if you can afford to sacrifice one of your Asana licenses/seats, is to create a dummy user called âRule botâ or something like that, which your Asana admin(s) can use to log in and set all the rules for all (or most) of your organisationâs projects. Anyone else wanting to create rules will also have to log in through this account or ask your Asana admin(s) to create these rules for them. Therefore this âRule botâ user will never be deprovisioned or removed from your Asana organisation and therefore no need to worry about rules ever being paused again! 
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This has actually presented itself twice as a major issue for us. Iâve been trying to implement Asana with our team for months, and the reporting dashboards and saved searches that are supposed to be core reasons for using Asana are completely broken when rules unexpectedly become paused. This happened once, I manually went through all 70+ projects and unpaused the rules and corrected all of the status changes that should have happened. Then today we noticed issues with the reports again and after a while I noticed most of our projects again have this rule paused.
I donât understand how the way this is handled makes any sense at all. You canât even see who owns a rule to know what would happen if they were deprovisioned. You get no notifications that rules are disabled. You get no admin authority to NOT pause rules. Essentially, all of the automation that is pushed so heavily to be so important to an organization can silently and unexpectedly die. And somehow this problem is not a priority for the Asana team to change. Of all of the complications, issues, and bugs Iâve had with Asana, this is one that feels like a dealbreaker. Having your entire organization scramble to figure out what parts of their data is wrong is an outrageous place to find yourself.
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We have a paid Division within a free-org. This is really disappointing as it creates random points of failure for the whole Division environment that will be near impossible to mitigate. Paying for a seat is a bit of a wasteful workaround rather than a solution, and it doesnât stop users from creating their own rules. The rules should be part of the project rather than owned the user. Does Asana have any interest in looking in to this?
Hi @Jennifer_Sheehan , I canât answer whether Asana will be looking into changing this because they do not publicly disclose their roadmap and I do not work for Asana, Iâm an independent Solutions Partner, like others in this forum with an orange badge.
Indeed, this workaround wonât stop users from creating their own rules, but that is what company-wide internal conventions can help with. As I noted above, this workaround is in the event that a company could âafford to sacrificeâ a licence i.e. since Asanaâs pricing per seats are set in bundles of 5, 10, or 25, over a certain amount of seats, this could lead to some seats being available for such a workaround. But I realise this may not apply for all cases.
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We have recently started working on Asana and had to create a mail forwarder- it worked. We created projects for each of the mail systems that had to be included- a total of 2 projects. We then added an asignee to each of these projects so as to ensure once an email is forwarded to the specified projected the Manager in charge of that would be alerted to then move the tasks to the appropriate team members to action it through creating rules that would allow this process to happen.
Then we hit a stumbling block.
The first case was that the rules worked for 2 out of 4 tests that we did:
as you can see twice the correct action was done- but after that its topped- when we checked the rules it said the rules were paused- we then activated it and within seconds it paused the rule again.
The second instance is on the second project we created in teh same fashion as the above and applied the same rules- in this instance the rules were not even activated but paused immediately:
Can anyone offer some explanation for why this is happening- non of the users have left etc.