I am the creator of teams that intentionally have no members as they are placeholders on the board template.
Ex Team “VP” exists to assign VP tasks to items on the template. A project starts and a VP is assigned to the project. The board for the project is created from the template and the team VP is replaced by the actual VP that is doing the tasks.
Some items and some sub items are being created where Monday is assigning me as the only item member and making me the owner of the item
Is this happening because the item or sub does not have an actual user (or users if the team had any) assigned to it?
This creates a lot of email to me as people make updates to the items. I cannot turn off Monday email to myself as i am legitimately the owner of some items.
What you’re describing is likely tied to how ownership behaves when there isn’t a valid user assigned.
If a template includes a People column assigned to a team that has no members, when a new board is created from that template, monday may default ownership to the board creator in cases where there’s no actual user to assign. That can result in you being added as the item owner, especially for subitems.
Subitems can also inherit or default ownership differently depending on how they’re created, particularly if automations are involved.
A couple of things you might check:
• Whether any automations are set to “assign someone” on item or subitem creation
• Whether the People column in the template is set to assign the board creator by default
• Whether replacing the placeholder team with a real user earlier in the process prevents the reassignment
Some teams avoid this by leaving the People column empty in the template and assigning the actual person after board creation, rather than using empty placeholder teams.
If you’d like hands-on help or want us to walk through this live, you can book a 1:1 paid 60-minute strategy session with our team here: Calendly
When an item or subitem is created and the assigned team has no actual users in it, it then defaults ownership to the board/template creator to ensure the item has a responsible owner. Since your placeholder teams contain no members, the system is falling back to you.
To prevent this, assign a real user immediately after board creation, use a generic placeholder account instead of an empty team, or add an automation to reassign ownership when items are created. It’s also good practice to make it part of your project kickoff process to replace placeholder teams with actual users before any new items or subitems are created.
I had originally tried generic placeholder accounts. Sadly my placeholder accounts did not have real email addresses behind them so the invitation to Monday could not be accepted. 90 days after the invitation was sent Monday auto deleted the user and all of the assignments on the Template. Consequently generic placeholder accounts will not work.
Totally agree the users need to own the board items. To replace the team they can search for that team and replace it with their user id. This can easily be done via a batch edit on the board. Changing the owner of an item however cannot be done via batch. It is a huge ask of someone to touch each item one by tedious one.
I had figured i was being added as the owner as the item had no other choice. I guess i change the question. Is there a way to change the item owners via a batch process?
