I have a person column (called Lead Guide) which is the person assigned to an item. I want to be notified when there is a change to the person column. So I set up automation as follows:
When Lead Guide (my person column) changes, notify me.
This works when the person column has a person added to it, but not when the person is removed.
How can I be notified when a person is removed? Note: My company does not allow integrations or apps aside from those included in the Monday.com product. Otherwise, I would just use a formula to ‘count’ how many people and trigger an automation based on the formula…but you can’t trigger automation based on a formula column.
I can reproduce the issue. For what that’s worth, its definitely not triggering when a people column changes to null. This seems to be consistent, other columns do not trigger when a value changes to null.
If you had another trigger of some sort, you could use the “if empty/not empty” conditional on recipes though. Possibly you could create a button column to clear the people column, that also sends the notification. Its a crude workaround and would require training to get people to use it - but it could be a solution.
If it makes you feel better, I don’t think any third-party apps/integrations could solve this as they wouldn’t get a triggering event either.
As far as I remember this is a change from a few month ago where you did receive a trigger when clearing a column. Looks like a side-effect (not documented) from monday DB
Thanks for confirming Cody. I was about to test on a different column type to see if it only happened with person columns, but you beat me to it. I also tested “if person changes and person is empty then notify me”, but that doesn’t work. In the item activity log, it clearly reflects the removal of the lead guide, so monday is smart enough to know the field was emptied…but just not smart enough for automation trigger.