Sort by Last Modified shows old tasks

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
Sort: Last Modified in search results shows months old tasks mixed in with recent tasks. Filtering the search by “Within the last N days” also shows tasks modified months ago.

Steps to reproduce:
In project: Search > Advanced Search > Collaborators: me > Search
Set Sort to “Last Modified”

Browser version:
Chrome 86.0.4240.111 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Upload screenshots below:

Hi @anon19843511, welcome to the Asana Community Forum!

In order to investigate this further, I recommend you to contact our support team and provide this information:

  • URL of the task that shouldn’t appear in your list when sorting by Last Modified
  • URL of this thread so you don’t need to re-write everything

Unfortunately I don’t have the tools in the forum to have a closer look and investigate this issue but our support team can certainly help you solve it!

Let me know if I can help you with anything else. Have a great day!

Hi Emily
I totally intended to have placed the topic in the Bugs category, not sure how it ended up in Tips and Tricks.

Please have it moved there if you can, and maybe hand it over to someone with the “tools”. Unless that indeed is not a place to report what definitely looks like a bug.

I can reproduce this behavior; I find many tasks in our system where the date “Last Modified” is later than the date “Completed At”…sometimes by more than 2 years. In none of these cases, did the history trail within the task give any indication as to what happened to create the record of modification in, say, Oct 2019 for a task that was completed as of March 2017 and obsolete for all purposes shortly thereafter. (But, as we all know, history items can be deleted and people often do as otherwise they can build up and hide data of interest.) So I would suggest that it may not be the Sort function at fault; the trouble may be in whatever process is creating unexpectedly late dates of modification for long-closed tasks.

11384, when you click into one of the tasks you did not expect to see in your search, do you see a recent date of modification (i.e. one that fits with the search and sort you have chosen)?

The dates in the screenshot are the dates of the latest change that is recorded in tasks. There is no confusion, when I write “Last modified” I mean last modified, not “Completed at”.
While it is not impossible that someone or something would go in to an old task months after, made a change and then erased traces of that, this sounds quite implausible. Occasionally this would be the case, but not all the time.
Then, consider why one searches for recently modified tasks in the first place. If there isn’t a modification to be identified, what is the point of showing them in the list. As far as UX goes, this is a failure of Sort.