Removed from a shared Board by a VA

Question

I've reached out to support and I'm hoping they can help, but how can I protect myself from this in the future?   I hired a VA and she removed me from the shared board, which has all of the content that I paid her to produce.   She is not responding to my emails.  She's upset because I will not be using her going forward so she removed me from the VA board.

Stephen Addis · Answer

Put a hold on her wages, and strong legal letter that you will be suing for any payments back, and any consequential losses you incur.

Dont muck about, all guns, both barrels.

Do put a polite request in, and note that you exepect by X date ... then following day, just after midnight, send.

Also, use SalesHandy website, trial should do you enough, is for 7 days ... adds a tracking pixel to the emails, so put in brackets at end of subject the date and time like (e20201007-0536) ... looks like an email filing ref ... it is, to that.

Read receipts, so last year, so denied etc ... this, as soon as they open and view, triggers pixel.

One pixle per email, so dont copy any one else in the email for legal assurity if lawyers start going through and saying it was your CC'd address that triggered.

I use it, infact for $80 per year, have bought ... its amazing to see people opening lits of emails from few weeks ago, means I know there is activity and may be queries or get my act in gear for anything I've in the que to do.

Sly b*stard me lol.

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Debbie you need to make sure you're the admin of the board and not the VA. Also, you can create an email address for your VA in your Office365/G-Suite account, and use the Atlassian Access SSO product to ensure you "own" their account and will therefore retain access to it:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/access

Thus you can remove their access before you give them any potentially disruptive news. In the end, if they get angry they can always go and delete cards one by one if they have access to the board. They can't mass delete cards (except with the use of the API) but they can create a private board and moves lists to that board which means you'll lose access to that information, and they can also archive all cards in all lists which can be a hassle to restore without using the API.

You can guard against this by copying the board periodically to keep a backup that is inaccessible to the VA, and you can also automate this process, here is a primer on automating that with Google Apps Script:

http://www.littlebluemonkey.com/blog/automatic-trello-backups-using-a-google-spreadsheet

Or this Trellinator function would take a daily copy of a board and store it linked to a card with the same name in a backups board:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/9cbd520fea27b28a9e643a026db69624

You can read more about Trellinator here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

That tutorial doesn't cover scheduling functions but if you get through the setup let me know and I can help you schedule that backup function. Otherwise I also provide this as a service you can just email team@benkoworks.com