Should a task owner receive alerts even if they aren't a collaborator?

I noticed that if I am the owner of a task but not a collaborator, that I don’t get any alerts to new comments or other actions on the task. Is that expected? In other words, does the owner also need to be a collaborator to receive the alerts?

My guess is it’s by design. I’ve never come across a situation where I wasn’t a collaborator of a task I owned nor when I’ve wanted to remove myself. If you’re not a collaborator, did you remove yourself? Did someone else?

@RyanE: Good question. We have a system that creates tasks via the API. We created a user account to be used by our systems for the purpose of creating tasks. When those tasks are created, we remove all the collaborators from the task so that the account used by the system doesn’t receive all those alerts from the task. We can adjust our system to only remove from the collaborators the account used by the system (rather than all collaborators), but I thought it was interesting that even an owner of a task wouldn’t receive alerts simply because the owner isn’t a collaborator.

If anyone from Asana could confirm that this is by design, as @RyanE suggests, that would be great.

I could see why it would be designed this way.

I’m sure there are situations where someone might want to remove oneself as a collaborator from a task they own. For instance, tasks where people are posting constant updates for the owner. Maybe the owner doesn’t want to be notified for each and every one but might track the updates once per day or week. I’ve been working on concepts where we’d have a “project of projects” project :slight_smile: used for tracking individual projects within single tasks and requesting updates to those tasks. People who own the project’s overall management would be assigned to these tasks. We discussed having people post weekly updates to these overall project tasks, but none of it is finalized yet. If we go that route, I wouldn’t necessarily want to be notified if someone posts their status, I’d review it prior to a planning or status meeting.

So I think the case can be made that it’s by design. If you want it confirmed, @Alexis might able to help, but your idea to only remove the API account as a collaborator sounds like a pretty good solution. Good luck.

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@RyanE: That’s a scenario I hadn’t thought of. :slight_smile: Thanks for the feedback!

@Alexis: Since @RyanE mentioned you might be able to help, I figure I should ask: is this by design?

Thanks!

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