Orphaned Trello Cards after list deletion

[Tyler Jensen]

Hi there,

I'm having an issue where some cards have become orphaned. Theory is that deleting (not archiving, hard delete using DELETE request) the list that still contained some cards has caused the cards to now have an idList that no longer exists.

No big deal, except calling DELETE on the card now returns a 400 error 'could not find list for card'. Attempting to move the orphaned card to a valid list on that board, or even a valid list on another board, returns the same error.

This was after some errors were being hit on a board so it was cleared/ reset (unrelated issue, turned out was excess unused labels piling up). I've now adjusted the reset to always delete cards first to avoid this. Code in normal operation clears cards first and only clears empty lists anyway, when not doing a nuclear reset. But none of this helps those permanently orphaned cards floating around.

🤷‍♂️

ps: what's up with this forum posting form.... page was resetting every 3 seconds until I forced it to stop doing that.

Cheers,
Tyler

[Darcy Leo]

This usually happens when a list is hard-deleted while cards are still linked to it. The cards then keep a broken idList reference, which causes API errors like “could not find list for card.” In this state, Trello often won’t allow moving or deleting the cards through normal API calls because the relationship is already invalid. It may require recreating a temporary list or using the UI (if visible) to reset the card’s state.