Here’s what I understand to be happening with this highly annoying bug. Someone creates a goal, then invites people as a “team”. But not just a few people … a lot of people. What happens next is where things go wonky. Someone on that team will edit the goal name. That essentially creates a new goal with the corrected spelling or adjusted wording … which in turn tries to drag all the other team members over to the newly named goal. In goals with not too many team members this works fine. But when there are a lot of team members and/or content associated with the original goal name the script which drags over your entries, comments and cheers crashes at some point. This results in a divided team and also in having a “completed” goal that remains on your list. Since it’s completed you can’t remove it—which is frustrating as all get out!

With much talking between Robots … and new Robot Laurel asking some important questions we came to a 3-pronged solution. We’re going to locate all the current corrupt goals, fix corrupted goals and also disallow the ability to change a goal name for future team goals. This should prevent the issue in the future. However, once you create a goal and invite people as team members you won’t be able to change the goal name any longer. That’s the trade-off. But a good one in my opinion.

Keep your fingers crossed and we’ll see if this all works in the coming days. Here’s a sketch of the conversation and the data model that we’re untangling.