That’s what comment-only is about, it does not cover your use case?
No, comment-only doesn’t cover our use case. The user may need to make updates to the due date and/or add additional information to the task (or may wish to create sub-tasks to help them break the work down further, depending on what the main task is).
But if they were assigned the task from someone else, they should not be able to DELETE it. I’m with the others who posted above, it’s not about malicious intent (typically), but there absolutely needs to be a level between “can’t do anything other than mark the task complete or comment on it” and “can do EVERYTHING, up to and including deleting a task that someone else assigned to me.”
Deleting tasks should only be an option for he person who originally created the task and account admin/super admin users (which covers situations like “no longer with the company” and similar).
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As I revisit a feature improvement I suggested more than five years ago (wow, time flies), I still struggle to understand how this hasn’t been implemented in some form or fashion.
The comment-only setting does not solve the desired outcome because it is so restrictive and must be set at each project level. Comment-only may have some beneficial use cases if you work with outside clients in an agency model, but I’d wager a significant percentage of Asana clients are primarily using the tool internally across (or within) teams. The inability to edit the task - whether that’s the description, custom fields, the assignee, or the due date makes comment-only an unviable solution.
The desired outcome could be achieved through several options, some more restrictive than others.
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Global/company-wide setting that prevents deletion of all tasks - The downside is that users sometimes accidentally create tasks and the only way to remove them would be to mark them complete. However, that’s a relatively minor occurrence and doesn’t really mess up much aside from some dashboards counting the number of tasks marked complete for a period of time. This is likely the easiest for Asana engineers to deploy and I bet would solve this issue for 99% of users.
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Global/company-wide setting that prevents deletion of all tasks UNLESS you are the creator. - An alternative option to the above, but there are times when employees might create tasks for themselves or others, and management wouldn’t want those to disappear without notice.
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Global/company-wide alert when a task is deleted - Not sure why I’m even suggesting this because it opens up issues of WHO to notify, especially if everyone is removed as a collaborator before deletion. An alternative option might be that the Project owner or editors get a notification, but we’re already trying to reduce Inbox clutter as-is and not every task resides within a project.
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Delete permissions at the project level - While not perfect since not every task (especially quick-create ones) may not reside within a project, and it would be on the Project owner to set this unless it was enabled by default, it at least gives some more controls.
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Delete permissions at the user level - Requires you to put some trust in your admin and the users who get assigned this permission, but would at least let us have some more control as everyone would default into the global setting I suggested in step 1 above.
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Put every deleted task into a Recycling Bin project only accessible to the Admin or select users. - Probably less than ideal from a security perspective as tasks may be private to the individual and you’d need to determine who you trust to review the tasks. An alternative to this might be to place the deleted task in the bin and anyone who was ever the creator, assignee, or collaborator (even if removed) on the task would be notified and able to view it. This probably requires the greatest amount of engineering effort, and I’m not even sure if metadata like historical collaborators is available.
Anyways, just some additional thoughts as I hope this gains enough traction to be implemented.
-Ben
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Well said, I as well as many others are leaning towards other task management because of this missing feature.
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Can anyone recommend another app similar to ASANA that prevents uses from deleting tasks?.
Thank you,
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The official Asana forum is not the right place to find an Asana alternative, I am sure you can understand why.
Not really, it a feature that has been requested in a thread for over 5 years. I am actively comparing alternatives at this point.
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Fair enough, but don’t ask Asana users to help you find an alternative 
I’m bumping this back up. I just blew several hours looking for a task that one of my users accidentally deleted. I ended up needing to get Asana Tech Support to restore several days worth of deleted tasks (there weren’t many).
We definitely need Asana to stop playing coy about this. I need a way that people can comment, add files, act on subtasks, but NOT delete the parent task, and NOT mark the parent task complete. We should have a way of locking them. This would make a perfect rule. “When XYZ Condition Met, Task is Locked by all users except for XYZ person”
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That’s what the “Comment-only” permission is for…
Yes, but isn’t that controlled on the team level? If I relegate a team member to “comment only”, is that going to block that team member from adding subtasks to these parent tasks?
It is controlled at the project level. And yes it would prevent them from doing almost anything to any task, Asana doesn’t have that micro-management for permissions indeed.
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Come on. Multiple people asking for this basic feature. You guys are overpriced, and it’s frustrating to see these basic core things unresponded to that are obvious needs of the platform. So many useless features and then this is missing.
Lock projects and tasks so only the person who created can delete. Other users can move it to completed but shouldn’t be able to delete it. As an owner I have had multiple issues where I assign a task to an employee and then they delete it without completion and then I don’t know about it which makes me not be able to use the platform for things I want to ensure get done > makes it all pointless.
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I’ll be honest this was a crazy thread to read. I don’t think I’ve seen a company string along users for this long. At this point, any decision is better than no decision. We have been piloting Asuna for a year now. Everyone has had a positive experience, I was considering expanding this pilot but not having granular permissions is hard stop for me. We piloted Asuna to store project progress that directly correlates to their year end performance review. Without the ability to prevent users from deleting tasks then we can not trust the data in Asuna.
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Why can’t we get simple user permissions? I love Asana but preventing team members from deleting tasks makes this platform UNUSABLE!
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Please share alternatives you found. As we scale our use of asana, tasks “disappearing” has wreaked havoc with our tracking and reporting (permanently deleted or automatically purged from trash can because we did not notice for 30 days). I thought Asana was going to be the killer app I needed to manage my team and program but trying to mitigate the random deletions has grown to be a huge time sink and I am ready to move on to something that does not need me to proactively check for leaks every few days.
@Barry_Evans were you able to explain why/how people deleted tasks? Because I can understand you can click delete by mistake, by clicking “delete permanently” as well seems like intentional.
If you go with the Enterprise+ plan, there are 3rd party apps doing archiving and backup, might be a way to mitigate the risk?
There is no absolutely way this hasn’t been implemented. I’ve visited this thread so many more times than I wished. Asana is so great I can’t conceive the idea of such a simple function not being programmed. You could just set the organization owner deletion permissions and nobody else, it’s ridiculously simple and we need it.
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I’m with you. I’ve had this page bookmarked since we started using Asana over a year ago. I have an Asana reminder to check in once a month. It’s turned into Groundhog Day at this point.
One would think that Asana engineers would see this thread and recognize that it’s been active for MORE THAN 6 YEARS. There can’t be many similar topics on the forums. As if that isn’t enough of a red flag, I have to imagine that this thread is an outlier in terms of all time page views / web traffic.