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My biggest beef with Trello is lack of multiple account support. For example if you use it in your home life (as their blog greatly encourages), and also want

My biggest beef with Trello is lack of multiple account support. For example if you use it in your home life (as their blog greatly encourages), and also want it for work (as their business model greatly encourages) then you'll want distinct accounts. Without distinct accounts, you get a mixing of the data, permissions, where it is accessed from, notifications, email sent by them, makes board admin harder etc. While you can try some hacky alternatives in a browser, they are a pain, confusing and a poor workaround. On mobile you are completely screwed, unless you want to log out and log back in each time you want to switch accounts. (You do have a long cryptic passphrase which makes this even worse?) Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right. Why does no one seem to learn? (Yes, Dropbox I am looking at you too.)

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
Google doesn't get multiple accounts exactly right across app boundaries. For example, the links to view a Google Groups discussion is completely broken when you're in gmail on a non-primary account (it attempts to load the link with your primary account, which won't have access, and switching to your secondary account drops the link to the group).
- hobs 11y ago
  Dont try to separate your youtube and gmail account, I have created 6 google+ pages overall and I lost all my playlists and watch history for years, but now I can comment on a video on youtube!
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    I entirely lost access to a YouTube account with videos totalling several million views because I apparently pressed a wrong button during that transition. Nothing to be done though. Google is a big fish.
    - hobs 11y ago
      :(, yeah. I had a friend who even talked to the youtube team about it, didnt have much hope.
      - jc4p 11y ago
        man I love running into you on here, hope you're doing well :)
        hobs 11y ago
        Haha, same to you pvam. If you havent already found him https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cryoshon https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cryoshon
jacquesm 11y ago
> Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right. I really hope that was a joke on your part. If there is one thing that was irritating it was how google would mix up and connect various accounts at random for no particular reason.
- jsmeaton 11y ago
  Sometimes. I find that ~90% (number from no where, I know..) links between apps usually work correctly. It's really really noticeable though when you open calendar from work gmail and I'm looking at my family calendar. Using the account switcher from that point is really easy, but it's very jarring when it doesn't do what you expect by default.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  My wording was poor, and Google certainly don't get them perfect. It does fundamentally work though - you can connect multiple users in web and mobile apps and switch between them as you see fit. Sometimes it does select the wrong account for whatever you were trying do (calendar used to do this a lot), but you can usually just switch to the correct account. My main frustration is services that don't even get close to Google's implementation and user experience for multiple accounts, despite it serving as an example for many years. Like Trello, most seem to not even bother, while others like Dropbox seemed to do the worst combination of things possible.
  - lobster_johnson 11y ago
    I would argue that Google's account system is extremely poor. What it considers your primary account is apparently the first one you add, so if the order is wrong, you have to sign out of all of them and start over [1]. But it's not exactly like that. Recently someone added me to a new Google Apps for Work (or whatever it's called this month) account, and now this new account is, mysteriously, the default account, even though I've had a different one for ages. If you open Google Calendar, it will embed the account number in the URL (https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/3/render https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/3/render, for example), but this number obviously isn't static. If you have multiple devices and sign in elsewhere, the number might be wrong. You also get this number as "?authuser=3" in every Google Hangout URL. But that number is yours — when people share a link like this, the recipient typically ends up opening GH for the wrong account. Google Hangouts is notoriously finicky about accounts, and the loading screen will often hang if you happen to be using the wrong one for a particular hangout ID. Sometimes GH shows the (tiny, dark gray) account switching link, sometimes not. (Hangouts is generally a disaster when it comes to actually starting one.) [1] http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/13/set-default-google-account-multiple-gmail-accounts/ http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/13/set-default-google-account-mu...
jimmaswell 11y ago
On Firefox mobile you can have one account logged in in normal tabs and another in private tabs.
- hk__2 11y ago
  On other browsers too but that’s hacky.
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    I don't really think it's hacky. For many years I would run 2 browsers side by side. Firefox for personal and Chrome for Business. It makes a nice separation and you don't need to worry about whether some tool you like to use has fancy multiple account tech. If the big guys like Google and Facebook can't get it right, I think it's unreasonable to expect smaller players to do better. You never need to think about who your are logged in as or who you are posting as.
    - grayclhn 11y ago
      You're using a feature of a program on your computer to circumvent account access decisions on someone else's server. This the definition of "hacky."
jamesfzhang 11y ago
If I'm not mistaken, Dropbox has had multiple account support for some time (about a year?).
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  That made me burst out in laughter. It has been longer than a year, and they made a huge mess of it. Essentially you can do a pseudo-merge of exactly one personal account into exactly one business account, that is then the beginning of all sorts of glitches and problems. That includes things like removing that personal user from the business account deleting all their personal content, being unable to separate the folders, logging into either account giving access to the other account, difficulty administering the accounts separately (a colleague had to call them up just to figure out how to update a credit card number and delete a user because he had both paid personal and business account psuedo-merged).
  - jamesfzhang 11y ago
    Glad to have made you laugh. I personally have never encountered any of the problems you mentioned. I used to work at a company that used Dropbox for Business and I just remember getting an email that I could connect that account with my personal one. I did connect the two and it worked fine for me. I had a simple use case so I didn't do anything out of the ordinary.
moultano 11y ago
Chrome profiles are the right tool for this. Just have a separate profile for work and for home. This has the added benefit of making it easy to stay logged out of time-wasting sites while at work.
- madeofpalk 11y ago
  Speaking of time-wasting sites, Google and Slack have managed to get an at least passable support of multiple accounts working. I understand it's difficult to do, but if you're a service that encourages it's use across work and personal life, you eventually need a way to manage people separating that. Perhaps they can have the concept of you always have a personal account, and you get /invited/ into an organisation? As apposed to Google's approach of having seperate, distinct accounts and you can 'easily' switch between them.
  - rogerbinns 11y ago
    > Perhaps they can have the concept of you always have a personal account, and you get /invited/ into an organisation? That sucks, and causes problems. Dropbox tried it. On the organisation side, they now have to remember that user redpuppy925 is actually an org member, rather than by the organisation identity. Then the user interface would have to show their personal and org content at the same time. You really don't want that happening on their home family computer, nor would the user likely appreciate their personal content always being available at work. It ends up far easier putting the wrong items in the wrong place. As an org admin, it should be very clear who has access to org information. And when they leave it should be very easy to revoke that access. Backups and auditing should only cover org data, not personal content.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  Ah, you don't have one of those mobile device thingies that are all the rage then? If you install the Trello app, then you can only have one user logged in at a time.
  - robocat 11y ago
adriand 11y ago
I love Trello and use it all the time, but since we're beefing about it, I've got two main issues to share: 1. The search is awful. I won't really elaborate on this except to say it's often really hard to find stuff and if they did some UX research on this I think it could be much improved. 2. I intentionally avoid opening the notifications pane except in certain moments because opening it clears the "read" status of the notifications therein. This is an issue, because I haven't necessarily read or dealt with the notification. Therefore, I only open the notifications pane when I'm in a spot where I can feasibly deal with or record every single important notification that it's going to show me, otherwise, there's the risk that the notification will go unread (in the true, real-life sense) and thus be missed entirely. All that said, bravo Trello, you're a great product.
- thedufer 11y ago
  My solution for point 2 is to refresh the page (assuming you're in the web version) before closing the notifications pane. It doesn't actually clear them until you close it, so this hackily works around the issue.
jlarocco 11y ago
What? That is so backwards from my experience that I'm tempted to think it's a troll, or I'm completely missing what you're trying to say. I have two Trello accounts and have never had a problem switching between them. I have one for work and another for personal stuff, just like you suggest, and it works fantastic. If I'm logged in to one and want to check the other I just log out, enter the credentials for the other account and it works exactly like I would expect. There's no mixing at all, they're completely distinct, which is exactly how I want it, and exactly how it should be, IMO. Google, on the other hand, is an absolute mess. At this point I've resigned myself to the fact that my work Gmail/Google+/Google/YouTube account and my personal Gmail are inextricably linked together and there's no way I can unlink them. It's such a disaster that it was a big factor in my decision to start moving my personal accounts away from Google.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  > ... it works fantastic ... just log out, enter the credentials for the other account ... So you just have to log out and re-enter credentials each time you want to view a different account? And that is fantastic? Doing it several times a day is a pain. Also you only get notifications for the currently logged in account, so you'd need multiple browsers running just to get notifications from both. Then if you have a mobile device, it becomes even worse as entering reasonably complex passphrases is a long tedious pain. Doing that several times a day is a non-starter.
  - middus 11y ago
    I think he is saying that it works for people who are either "at work" or "at home". Once you want to have your work notifactions during your leisure time, it gets complicated.
  - jlarocco 11y ago
    I wouldn't use Trello if they linked multiple accounts like that. TBH, I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to get work notifications at home or home notifications at work. Ditto for mobile devices. Work notifications go to the work device, home notifications to my personal device, and I don't want them mashed together.
victorhooi 11y ago
I find the Google account switcher - whilst not perfect (not being able to change the "Default" account is annoying), better than many other web services. However, one thing I've found helpful - Chrome's inbuilt account switcher. You can access this by clicking on the button in the top-right - basically, you can be signed into multiple Google accounts, one per Chrome window - and they will each have their own cookies, tabs etc. So it's a good way of keeping things segregated.
isaiahg 11y ago
Can't you easily accomplish this using their teams feature? I just set up a team and add the appropriate users with the right permissions for the team's boards.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  Lets say I am a personal user, and share some boards with family and friends. Now you want to add me to a team for work. You won't be able to find me using my work email address - instead you'll have to map in whatever random service I use for personal email. Let's hope my personal identity doesn't conflict with work. Now I am team member and can also access boards. That also means that team boards are exposed whenever and wherever I login, even if I only want to login for personal information. Some family members and friends may know my personal login, so now team information is also accessible to them. I'll now get notifications for personal and work related activity going to the same browsers and email accounts. Are you sure work's admin really wants work information going to my personal email account? Do I want to get distracted by personal notifications during a work day and vice versa? Now that my personal and work are intermingled, I am also more likely to make a mistake such as creating new boards/lists/cards in the "wrong" place, and it will be harder to notice. Work can't be sure that they have everything backed up. Then a year later I leave. Somehow the work admin is going to have to figure out which user I am (remember not related to work conventions and standards), and disentangle me. Providing I have been perfect and never intermingled anything, it will be fine. The odds of that are low. Essentially the single account has just made everything worse, to the benefit of no-one.
threatofrain 11y ago
While people chastise Google's multiple account issues, I would say at least Google has such a thing up to some minimally viable level of quality. I'd also add to the list of grievances that Trello has yet to have a multi-select / multi-edit feature, something I see has been asked for over 3 years ago.
- stevoski 11y ago
  It took Google years to get multiple accounts sorted out. For a long time I had to sign out of my personal Google account before I could sign in to my company Google account.
victorp13 11y ago
Such an edge case. Typical example of user feedback that leads to software bloat. There are a great number of workarounds for your 'problem'.
jon-wood 11y ago
Chrome's multiple profile support can be a big help here if you're that determined to separate things. Set up a profile for personal stuff, and one for work stuff, and then you can have both accounts logged in at once.
- lucian1900 11y ago
  That is very useful indeed and I also do it for a lot of things. However, it doesn't solve the problem the mobile apps have.
realusername 11y ago
If someone at Skype could take some notes on this also...

ThrustVectoring 11y ago

Google doesn't get multiple accounts exactly right across app boundaries. For example, the links to view a Google Groups discussion is completely broken when you're in gmail on a non-primary account (it attempts to load the link with your primary account, which won't have access, and switching to your secondary account drops the link to the group).

hobs 11y ago
Dont try to separate your youtube and gmail account, I have created 6 google+ pages overall and I lost all my playlists and watch history for years, but now I can comment on a video on youtube!
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  I entirely lost access to a YouTube account with videos totalling several million views because I apparently pressed a wrong button during that transition. Nothing to be done though. Google is a big fish.
  - hobs 11y ago
    :(, yeah. I had a friend who even talked to the youtube team about it, didnt have much hope.
    - jc4p 11y ago
      man I love running into you on here, hope you're doing well :)
      - hobs 11y ago
        Haha, same to you pvam. If you havent already found him https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cryoshon https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cryoshon

jacquesm 11y ago

> Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right. I really hope that was a joke on your part. If there is one thing that was irritating it was how google would mix up and connect various accounts at random for no particular reason.

jsmeaton 11y ago
Sometimes. I find that ~90% (number from no where, I know..) links between apps usually work correctly. It's really really noticeable though when you open calendar from work gmail and I'm looking at my family calendar. Using the account switcher from that point is really easy, but it's very jarring when it doesn't do what you expect by default.
rogerbinns 11y ago
My wording was poor, and Google certainly don't get them perfect. It does fundamentally work though - you can connect multiple users in web and mobile apps and switch between them as you see fit. Sometimes it does select the wrong account for whatever you were trying do (calendar used to do this a lot), but you can usually just switch to the correct account. My main frustration is services that don't even get close to Google's implementation and user experience for multiple accounts, despite it serving as an example for many years. Like Trello, most seem to not even bother, while others like Dropbox seemed to do the worst combination of things possible.
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  I would argue that Google's account system is extremely poor. What it considers your primary account is apparently the first one you add, so if the order is wrong, you have to sign out of all of them and start over [1]. But it's not exactly like that. Recently someone added me to a new Google Apps for Work (or whatever it's called this month) account, and now this new account is, mysteriously, the default account, even though I've had a different one for ages. If you open Google Calendar, it will embed the account number in the URL (https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/3/render https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/3/render, for example), but this number obviously isn't static. If you have multiple devices and sign in elsewhere, the number might be wrong. You also get this number as "?authuser=3" in every Google Hangout URL. But that number is yours — when people share a link like this, the recipient typically ends up opening GH for the wrong account. Google Hangouts is notoriously finicky about accounts, and the loading screen will often hang if you happen to be using the wrong one for a particular hangout ID. Sometimes GH shows the (tiny, dark gray) account switching link, sometimes not. (Hangouts is generally a disaster when it comes to actually starting one.) [1] http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/13/set-default-google-account-multiple-gmail-accounts/ http://osxdaily.com/2014/08/13/set-default-google-account-mu...

jimmaswell 11y ago

On Firefox mobile you can have one account logged in in normal tabs and another in private tabs.

hk__2 11y ago
On other browsers too but that’s hacky.
- jay_kyburz 11y ago
  I don't really think it's hacky. For many years I would run 2 browsers side by side. Firefox for personal and Chrome for Business. It makes a nice separation and you don't need to worry about whether some tool you like to use has fancy multiple account tech. If the big guys like Google and Facebook can't get it right, I think it's unreasonable to expect smaller players to do better. You never need to think about who your are logged in as or who you are posting as.
  - grayclhn 11y ago
    You're using a feature of a program on your computer to circumvent account access decisions on someone else's server. This the definition of "hacky."

jamesfzhang 11y ago

If I'm not mistaken, Dropbox has had multiple account support for some time (about a year?).

rogerbinns 11y ago
That made me burst out in laughter. It has been longer than a year, and they made a huge mess of it. Essentially you can do a pseudo-merge of exactly one personal account into exactly one business account, that is then the beginning of all sorts of glitches and problems. That includes things like removing that personal user from the business account deleting all their personal content, being unable to separate the folders, logging into either account giving access to the other account, difficulty administering the accounts separately (a colleague had to call them up just to figure out how to update a credit card number and delete a user because he had both paid personal and business account psuedo-merged).
- jamesfzhang 11y ago
  Glad to have made you laugh. I personally have never encountered any of the problems you mentioned. I used to work at a company that used Dropbox for Business and I just remember getting an email that I could connect that account with my personal one. I did connect the two and it worked fine for me. I had a simple use case so I didn't do anything out of the ordinary.

moultano 11y ago

Chrome profiles are the right tool for this. Just have a separate profile for work and for home. This has the added benefit of making it easy to stay logged out of time-wasting sites while at work.

madeofpalk 11y ago
Speaking of time-wasting sites, Google and Slack have managed to get an at least passable support of multiple accounts working. I understand it's difficult to do, but if you're a service that encourages it's use across work and personal life, you eventually need a way to manage people separating that. Perhaps they can have the concept of you always have a personal account, and you get /invited/ into an organisation? As apposed to Google's approach of having seperate, distinct accounts and you can 'easily' switch between them.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  > Perhaps they can have the concept of you always have a personal account, and you get /invited/ into an organisation? That sucks, and causes problems. Dropbox tried it. On the organisation side, they now have to remember that user redpuppy925 is actually an org member, rather than by the organisation identity. Then the user interface would have to show their personal and org content at the same time. You really don't want that happening on their home family computer, nor would the user likely appreciate their personal content always being available at work. It ends up far easier putting the wrong items in the wrong place. As an org admin, it should be very clear who has access to org information. And when they leave it should be very easy to revoke that access. Backups and auditing should only cover org data, not personal content.
rogerbinns 11y ago
Ah, you don't have one of those mobile device thingies that are all the rage then? If you install the Trello app, then you can only have one user logged in at a time.
- robocat 11y ago

adriand 11y ago

I love Trello and use it all the time, but since we're beefing about it, I've got two main issues to share: 1. The search is awful. I won't really elaborate on this except to say it's often really hard to find stuff and if they did some UX research on this I think it could be much improved. 2. I intentionally avoid opening the notifications pane except in certain moments because opening it clears the "read" status of the notifications therein. This is an issue, because I haven't necessarily read or dealt with the notification. Therefore, I only open the notifications pane when I'm in a spot where I can feasibly deal with or record every single important notification that it's going to show me, otherwise, there's the risk that the notification will go unread (in the true, real-life sense) and thus be missed entirely. All that said, bravo Trello, you're a great product.

thedufer 11y ago
My solution for point 2 is to refresh the page (assuming you're in the web version) before closing the notifications pane. It doesn't actually clear them until you close it, so this hackily works around the issue.

jlarocco 11y ago

What? That is so backwards from my experience that I'm tempted to think it's a troll, or I'm completely missing what you're trying to say. I have two Trello accounts and have never had a problem switching between them. I have one for work and another for personal stuff, just like you suggest, and it works fantastic. If I'm logged in to one and want to check the other I just log out, enter the credentials for the other account and it works exactly like I would expect. There's no mixing at all, they're completely distinct, which is exactly how I want it, and exactly how it should be, IMO. Google, on the other hand, is an absolute mess. At this point I've resigned myself to the fact that my work Gmail/Google+/Google/YouTube account and my personal Gmail are inextricably linked together and there's no way I can unlink them. It's such a disaster that it was a big factor in my decision to start moving my personal accounts away from Google.

rogerbinns 11y ago
> ... it works fantastic ... just log out, enter the credentials for the other account ... So you just have to log out and re-enter credentials each time you want to view a different account? And that is fantastic? Doing it several times a day is a pain. Also you only get notifications for the currently logged in account, so you'd need multiple browsers running just to get notifications from both. Then if you have a mobile device, it becomes even worse as entering reasonably complex passphrases is a long tedious pain. Doing that several times a day is a non-starter.
- middus 11y ago
  I think he is saying that it works for people who are either "at work" or "at home". Once you want to have your work notifactions during your leisure time, it gets complicated.
- jlarocco 11y ago
  I wouldn't use Trello if they linked multiple accounts like that. TBH, I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to get work notifications at home or home notifications at work. Ditto for mobile devices. Work notifications go to the work device, home notifications to my personal device, and I don't want them mashed together.

victorhooi 11y ago

I find the Google account switcher - whilst not perfect (not being able to change the "Default" account is annoying), better than many other web services. However, one thing I've found helpful - Chrome's inbuilt account switcher. You can access this by clicking on the button in the top-right - basically, you can be signed into multiple Google accounts, one per Chrome window - and they will each have their own cookies, tabs etc. So it's a good way of keeping things segregated.

isaiahg 11y ago

Can't you easily accomplish this using their teams feature? I just set up a team and add the appropriate users with the right permissions for the team's boards.

rogerbinns 11y ago
Lets say I am a personal user, and share some boards with family and friends. Now you want to add me to a team for work. You won't be able to find me using my work email address - instead you'll have to map in whatever random service I use for personal email. Let's hope my personal identity doesn't conflict with work. Now I am team member and can also access boards. That also means that team boards are exposed whenever and wherever I login, even if I only want to login for personal information. Some family members and friends may know my personal login, so now team information is also accessible to them. I'll now get notifications for personal and work related activity going to the same browsers and email accounts. Are you sure work's admin really wants work information going to my personal email account? Do I want to get distracted by personal notifications during a work day and vice versa? Now that my personal and work are intermingled, I am also more likely to make a mistake such as creating new boards/lists/cards in the "wrong" place, and it will be harder to notice. Work can't be sure that they have everything backed up. Then a year later I leave. Somehow the work admin is going to have to figure out which user I am (remember not related to work conventions and standards), and disentangle me. Providing I have been perfect and never intermingled anything, it will be fine. The odds of that are low. Essentially the single account has just made everything worse, to the benefit of no-one.

threatofrain 11y ago

While people chastise Google's multiple account issues, I would say at least Google has such a thing up to some minimally viable level of quality. I'd also add to the list of grievances that Trello has yet to have a multi-select / multi-edit feature, something I see has been asked for over 3 years ago.

stevoski 11y ago
It took Google years to get multiple accounts sorted out. For a long time I had to sign out of my personal Google account before I could sign in to my company Google account.

victorp13 11y ago

Such an edge case. Typical example of user feedback that leads to software bloat. There are a great number of workarounds for your 'problem'.

jon-wood 11y ago

Chrome's multiple profile support can be a big help here if you're that determined to separate things. Set up a profile for personal stuff, and one for work stuff, and then you can have both accounts logged in at once.

lucian1900 11y ago
That is very useful indeed and I also do it for a lot of things. However, it doesn't solve the problem the mobile apps have.

realusername 11y ago

If someone at Skype could take some notes on this also...