Ability to prevent duplicate Project titles

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
Asana allows multiple projects to be created with the same title on the same team. This leads to duplicate projects and tasks not being centralized in the correct project but rather spread out over the duplicate projects.
Steps to reproduce:
Create two projects in the same team with the same name.

It is a little bit unusual and can get very tricky across teams, Advanced Searches etc. I usually recommend some type of prefix is used to distinguish. My duplicates are normally between teams and every project within a Team allows me to know what team it belongs to. For instance two Teams Accounting Department, Marketing Department both having a project called Uploaded Documents: ACTY| Uploaded Documents MRKT| Uploaded Documents. By the way | is an unrecognized special character in Asana which will be converted to a dash in Project Names. I just like the looks of it :slight_smile:

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Thanks! The problem is that people are creating duplicate projects within the same team, not across teams. If it was across teams that would be slightly easier and we could use the prefix but the duplicate projects in the same team are a mistake as opposed to necessary.

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Sounds like you are going to have to create consequences for bad behavior :grinning:. It is rudimentary but you could try an Advanced Search periodically something like this and sort by Project.

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Same issue with Tasks. I can’t say why Asana allows it, but it can clearly cause issues. Especially if users aren’t aware.

As @James_Carl is saying user awareness and organizational policy on how to name items in Asana are your best options at this time.

What would be a nice help from Asana is if the same autocompletion list of Project and Task names you get when you @ mention in comments was also provided when naming Tasks and Projects so users get an awareness of what already exists and can use it as a tool to create a unique name.

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I agree. Members in my organization definitely just need to be more aware of the projects they’re creating and confirm they’re not duplicating. It would just be nice to have more safeguards in place.

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I just created a Project with a name that already existed, and the system allowed me to do so. Is there a way to prevent this from happening or at least be warned?
Thanks

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HI @DavidWS and thank you for reaching out!

As it stand there isn’t a way to prevent duplicate projects to be created but I can certainly understand how useful this would be.

There is an existing thread regarding this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with it. Please have a look at the workarounds provided on the thread, you might find it useful. I would also encourage you to cast your vote by clicking on the Vote button next to the title.

Thank you David! Have a nice week!

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Hi Natalia,

I am using Asana for our projects and I have an issue where Asana is randomly duplicating tasks over and over again. Do you know why this might be please?

I’m having the same problem. When we mark the task as complete or delete it, a duplicate is made without our knowledge. Today I had a task come up as due today that I completed exactly one week ago. I see in the notes that my teammate “duplicated” the task, but she said she deleted it. I can’t find any answers to this inadvertent duplication of tasks anywhere!

I was hoping a better workaround or safe guard for this had come up.

Any movement from Asana?

Seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to prevent people from inadvertently creating duplicate projects! It makes me wonder if there’s a reason anyone would purposely do it. Is it ever useful?

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I can’t rely on using Search to look for existing Projects, as they could be Private.

We have a lot of Private Projects, because a member of our management team strongly dislikes seeing long lists of Projects that aren’t relevant to him.

It feels like the tools to really manage the entities are lacking.

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