Orphaned Trello boards – cannot rename or delete (original owner left)

[Elijah Egan]

We have orphaned Trello boards in our workspace “Generate Leads”.

The original board owner has left the company and their account is no longer active.
We are Workspace Admins but cannot rename or delete the boards because ownership is missing.

Boards affected:
– Built Interiors
– Tritech

We need ownership reassigned to a Workspace Admin or the boards removed.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Elijah Egan 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Are you using a Free Trello subscription or a paid Trello subscription?

Can the email address of the former user be reactivated and the credentials provided to another user to login and update the board admins, or delete the boards?

[Elijah Egan]

Hi Trudy, 

we had a paid subscription with a number of seats last year, we weren’t using it enough so went back to the free version which I’m currently using but looking at the paid version again.

I can’t access the email of the person that created those two boards, it’s since been deleted. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Disclaimer: I am not a Trello expert. I'm just looking at the publicly available documentation.

According to Delete a board the board must first be Closed. At that point a Trello workspace admin can delete the board if the Trello Workspace is not Free.

And according to Close a board "Only board admins and Premium Workspace admins can close a board."

And finally, according to Make someone an admin of a board, "Only board admins, and Workspace admins in paid Workspaces can make someone else a board admin."

So, if you are not able to upgrade to a paid subscription, and the only person who was a board admin has left, and their account can't be reactivated and used by another person, then you appear to be stuck with no option for getting rid of the orphaned boards.

Again, not a Trello expert, but maybe there is an option to upgrade to a Trial of a paid Trello subscription temporarily, remove the orphaned boards, and then downgrade to the Free workspace again.

https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/change-or-cancel-your-trello-plan/