Two Way Connection Column Disappeared 2

Platform discussions
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1

Hello!
My problem is not new, but it still needs to be solved.
The problem was described in this thread:

Monday team, can you solve this problem at your level?

2

Hi @Joilet!

Sorry to hear you have lost this column :frowning:

Is there any insight into where this column may have gone via the activity log in your board? You can search for the item via the search function.

That being said, if you’re unable to locate the column our support team can certainly look into this for you incase this data can be recovered. That being said, whilst they can certainly engage in some investigating from the back end I cannot guarantee that the data will 100% be restored for you - that said they will certainly try their best to get to the bottom of this :pray: You can reach out to the team via support@monday.com who will forward you over to our technical team. I hope you get this column back!!

3

Our company has more than 50 employees who use Monday. Any of the employees can make a private duplicate of a table and all other tables that were linked to that table will stop working correctly.
This is a problem that causes some discomfort when using your service.
I have some suggestions on how to solve this problem on your end:

  1. Add a feature that prevents duplicate tables for all users
  2. Make sure that a duplicated table is not automatically linked to other tables.
4

Thanks for this information! I appreciate this feedback :pray: From my testing, it is expected that when duplicating a board that is connected to other boards, the connections will remain active in the duplicated board. Can you elaborate on what happens to those connections when the board is duplicated? Are they removed? Or is the general performance impacted?

5

Hi. Did someone by any chance duplicate the board and move the duplicate to a private workspace, or make the duplicated board private? I have recently had this issue where I duplicated a board which had a connection, and moved it to a private workspace. That in effect meant that there were two sets of data connected to that column - one from the original connection, and one from the duplicated one in the private workspace. Because some of that data was private, it made the column disappear for everyone on the original board. I was the only one who could see it, because the private workspace I’d moved the duplicate board to was mine - only I had access.

Unfortunately, in your position, there is no good way to tell whether someone has done this except ask around. Because they are the only person who can rectify it.

If you can identify them, they can fix it by going to the board where the connected column is (the one you can no longer see, but they should be able to), and going to Settings > Customise Connect Board column. That should show that TWO boards are connected: the one it’s meant to be connected to, and the duplicated board. They just need to hit disconnect for the duplicated board (make sure they choose the right one because this action is irreversible). Then when you hit refresh, it should (hopefully) be back. It might take an hour or so to reappear, because that’s what happened to us.

Just a hunch, but this is one possible explanation.

https://community.monday.com/t/two-way-connection-column-disappeared/37171

6

We are also experiencing this problem on our multi-million dollar projects. Needless to say, this single issue is causing major management concerns that may require us to use a more reliable platform. Any prompt fix to this issue would be appreciated, or at least the traceability to understand that it’s happened. This is a “catastrophic” failure when data goes missing and there needs to be a way to 1) see what went wrong 2) correct it, and ideally 3) prevent it

7

Hey Steven, I apologise for the delay in getting back to you, it appears I missed your reply here :pray:

I am sorry to hear of this on your end and would be happy to investigate this further. To clarify, is your issue is similar to that of Joilet, to which you duplicated a board causing the connected column to disappear or have performance implications? A little more context would be greatly appreciated so we can get to the bottom of this for you!

8

Here is a summary, by way of a hypothetical scenario, that clarifies the root cause issue/flaw we are seeing in the Monday.com platform:

  • Jim makes two private boards: Projects and People
  • He creates a two-way link (connected boards) column so he can see which people are on the projects and vise versa.
  • Jim invites 10 of his favorite co-workers to the boards to collaborate.
  • Jim’s new co-worker, Bill, see the Projects board structure and thinks to himself, ‘I could use this for another task I have to do at work, I’m going to duplicate what Jim created on the Projects board because it’s so nicely setup and that will save me a lot of time.’
  • Bill duplicates the Projects board (with structure and items) and call the duplicate board, Bills Projects, which he marks as a private board and doesn’t invite anyone else to, since it is for his own private use.
    • Bill doesn’t realize that Bills Projects is still connected to the People Board, or at least, he moves on without paying much attention to it. Maybe he decides to use a different strategy for managing his tasks and forgets to delete the new board he created
 it is after all a private board
 it shouldn’t matter is he doesn’t delete it right away right? (hint
 wrong)
  • Jim opens the People Board, expecting to see the linked column to the Projects board with various mirrored columns, but to his surprise, they’re gone! He checks activity, no one deleted anything, the data is just “gone” with no explanation or reason. Jim is confused because he was the only owner of the board and he had permissions set to prevent anyone from modifying the board structure.
    • The reason that the linked columns to the Projects board are “gone” is because Bills Projects is also linked to People, so the Monday.com permissions logic wants to prevent Jim from seeing Bill’s private data in the connected boards/mirrored columns, but in doing so, it hides all connected boards and mirrored data from Jim and his team.
    • This opens up a horrible issue – there is nothing Jim can do to secure his boards other than plead and ask his team not to duplicate them, but we all know that’s not a reliable solution at scale. It also allows for someone to maliciously render boards useless if they’d like, simply by duplicating boards, which anyone can do if they just add themselves to a workspace (which anyone can do for most subscription levels of Monday.com)
  • Jim painstakingly figures out what happened
 by no intuitive means available, but just through luck and communication with his team. Jim and Bill rectify the issue, but the automations are broken now in the process and need to be setup once again.

I hope this has conveyed how critical an issue this is to proper use of boards. In my opinion, a linchpin feature of Monday.com is the connected boards column type. However, if users are not able to setup two-way connections without major risk to board integrity, this poses a large operational risk for the platform.

The best known workaround to date is to add workspace permissions to prevent anyone but workspace owners from creating private/shareable boards. I believe this still exposes the edge case of two public boards with a two way connection, one getting duplicated, moved to another workspace, and then made private. So ultimately the hole still exists. Even with this workaround that removes the main cause of the issue, it also costs the entire team the ability to create private/shareable boards in a workspace, which is not ideal.

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