Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing: Subtasks being generated with assignee but not attached to a main task.
Steps to reproduce: Unlcear on the steps to reproduce this. One of our team members will login to his dashboard and will have a ton of subtasks assigned to him that are not a part of a main task. They are standalone “phantom” tasks that he is required to delete out because they are not part of a larger main task.
Those aren’t “subtasks” (subtasks are tasks which are connected to some parent task), they’re top-level tasks.
Asana allows for a task to be created that’s not attached to any project; that’s what these tasks are. So it’s not a bug per se that they exist.
Now the question is, who is creating them and why (if it’s not the person who is the assignee)? The thing to do is to look at task’s activity history area at the bottom of the task’s detail pane; that should tell you who created it and when.
Thanks for your response. I took a further look here and found that these tasks are being autogenerated by Asana and it states "Action taken via “Add Subtasks” rule, owned by Izzy Krempa (image attached). It seems as those the subtask rule is being triggered but generated main tasks and not subtasks that are attached to a larger main task.
So, looking closer that your screenshots I see something I missed previously.
I was focused on your second one, of the task detail pane; that particular task is not a subtask - the reason you can tell that is because it has no breadcrumbs to a parent task which Asana shows at the top of the detail pane of a subtask, like this:
However, looking at your top screenshot, that hows that some of thes tasks ARE subtasks, while others are not. In list view, for a subtasks, Asana shows the parent task in light gray to the right of the subtask name. Meaning that the highlighted tasks are subtasks:
If it were me, the next thing I would do is go to that list view and examine the tasks that show as subtasks vs the ones that don’t, and see if you can determine the difference between them.
I don’t think so. My advice would be for @Izzy_Krempa to look at the task audit trail specifically for one of the disconnected tasks and see if that provides any clues as to how it got that way.
If that doesn’t work, save an advanced search specifically for “Copywriting” and “Not subtask” (get that via Add filter > More > Subtasks) with the sort to date modified. Periodically visit that in case that helps pinpoint the time when it happens and try to recall what happened prior.
Thanks for your responses. I went ahead and took a look at the advanced search and will continue to audit and found the follow task that does not have breadcrumbs to a parent task with the same activity history saying that Asana created the task based on "Action taken via “Add Subtasks” rule that I created. I went ahead and deleted out the rule and re-added it in hoping maybe that would mitigate some of the rogue requests but please let me know if you think this is a bug and should be investigated further.
Re-entering the rule did not rectify the issue and another rogue task came through today. Can you please take the next steps in investigating this bug?
I’m an independent Asana Services Provider and don’t work for Asana so you will have to pursue this, or perhaps @Rebecca_McGrath or @Nao_Kumazaki will weigh in here.
You could do the following:
If you haven’t already please follow all the troubleshooting steps here:
@Phil_Seeman + @lpb, thanks for your support and for looping us in! Unfortunately, at this stage, we need to take a closer look into these tasks to figure what’s going on.
I would recommend reaching out to our support team with the following supporting information so our team can look into this for you.
Pick one task and one subtask and send our support team the following:
Screenshot of the task/subtask in the project list
Screenshot of the task/subtask audit trail
URL of the said task/subtask
I’m moving this bug to Closed as this isn’t something we can sort out directly on the forum, but once this is resolved, will you let us know what the solution was?
Let us know if there is anything else we can support you with
