Butler stopped working

[Geza Toth]

Since yesterday Butler stopped working. 

It started to slow down taking up to 10 second to process rules, now it is not working at all. I doubt that I have hit the 1000 processes... 

[Geza Toth · Accepted solution]

Well all right. I have to say that I have now realized that I have created the boards in my personal space and not in the team space... 

I have moved the boards to the team space.

My card automation is up and running and 

"Your organization's quota is 1200 command runs and 5000 operations, of which 20 command runs (2%) and 35 operations (1%) have been used so far this period."

:)

Still, it should be more clear what the limitations are.

[Alberto Blasco]

@Geza Toth 

Do you thing that is enough?

BR

[Mads Albertsen]

Hi. I have a problem that seems to be related. I have a rules that states "when a card is moved into list "Done" by anyone, move the card to the top of the list, and mark the due date as complete". It has worked perfectly for a period og time, but suddenly it has stopped working. And further alle the cards that has previously been marked as "Completed" by the rule, are no longer completed. I have used 169 commands and 180 operations. Any idea what can be wrong?

[Roman Kiselev]

I used to use the old good butlerbot for some time, which had a quota of 500 operations - it was barely enough. Now Trello is making a transition to Butler power-up and the butlerbot is not maintained anymore, its dashboard stopped working.

I transitioned a lot of my command to the power-up and was pretty happy with the way it works. I thought I can rely on this system. Now, two days later, it says me that I reached my limit! "Your personal quota is 25 command runs" per month and I cannot pay to upgrade my account to have more?! WHAT?! Sorry, THAT'S A RIDICULOUSLY LOW LIMIT, IT'S LESS THAN ONE COMMAND PER DAY! Are you serious? It's like giving a car to someone to rely on and drive around, a car that goes out of gas after 25 seconds of driving. Can you buy more gas for it to run longer? - no, you can't!

I just can't understand what could be a reason to have such low limits. They render such a cool product quite useless and can ruin its success.

[Iain Dooley]

@Roman Kiselev you can pay to upgrade your account to have more, if you switch your team to business class the limits will be much higher.

[Roman Kiselev]

@Iain Dooley Sure, that's what one would naturally think of, but it clearly says 'We are not currently able to take new customers' (see the picture)! I actually would be happy to make a small contribution, but clearly something is just not working there.

[Iain Dooley]

@Roman Kiselev That's right you can no longer upgrade to their legacy Butler for Trello plans, but if you're on a Business Class or Trello Gold plan, you get your quota that way. Butler is just part of Trello now.

[Roman Kiselev]

Oh now I see what it means!

So the message in the 'Upgrade' tab actually says "We [the butlerbot company] are not currently able to take new customers[, but you can upgrade your account with Trello to get increased quota]".

This starts to make sense to me, but IMHO they convey this information in an extremely confusing way. I'll consider an upgrade then. Thank you very much for clarifications!

Roman

[Roman Kiselev]

@Iain Dooley I upgraded to Trello Gold, and it indeed helped. Now I see "Your personal quota is 200 command runs and 2000 operations. You've used 0 command runs (0%) and 0 operations (0%) so far this period." Thank you for your tips!

[Iain Dooley]

@Geza Toth I just created a rule and it executed pretty snappily, so this doesn't appear to be a system wide problem. You can check your usage in the account section and can also check the command log for errors:

[Geza Toth]

Yeah.. Thanks.

Your personal quota is 200 command runs and 2000 operations. You've used 200 command runs (100%) and 384 operations (19%) so far this period.

That answers it... I think this is a very silly and low number...

[Iain Dooley]

@Geza Toth yes the usage quotas are pretty frustrating. You can upgrade to Business Class to get more .... however when I was consulting with Butler Bot for a year, I found that even with their team plans which had pretty substantial quota, when I really took things to the next level I would run up against the limits... there were no warnings when command runs were going to be exhausted, and when they run out you are rather unceremoniously dropped off a cliff: no "holding" of commands like Zapier, no way to buy more commands to keep things running etc. Quite devastating.

I used to work around it by just buying new team licenses using aliases of my gmail account, which you could do using Business Class now, however there is still a hard cap on executions, even for enterprise.

So I think Butler is a wonderful, magical tool and I always have. It's the perfect complement to the simplicity of Trello, but it has a limited scope within which it can be useful and then you really need to have another API solution to go beyond that.

Because I was building quite complicated business systems using Trello as the platform, I ended up creating Trellinator which is a framework for automating Trello (and other things) using Google Apps Script:

https://trello.com/integrations/#/trellinator

I ended up porting about 1600 Butler commands I had created for my clients over to it.

[Geza Toth]

@Iain Dooley Thanks! I will take a look at trellinator.

What I find very "interesting" that  I never saw this butler (understand that it is the part of trello now) limitation. In fact this would suggest that I have no limits:

and

What it should also say, certain limitations do apply...

[Alberto Blasco]

Hi @Geza Toth ,

I am at the same point right now, so this morning i had updated to bussines class to get more from butler, but still it is limited to 1200 commands and 5000 operations. That mean 40 commands per day and 166 operations. That is really low profile when you pay for a service, and it just limit the usage of Butler a lot, making it impossible to use...

Please trello support, do you have plans of increase those limits? Otherwise, could you suggest how to use that power-up in an efficent way?

We will see if they deserve us to keep using payment over free...

[Daniel Tan]

@Iain Dooley I'm still within my limit but it already stopped working any advice? this didn't work

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Butler-Automation-rule-not-working/qaq-p/1414392

couldn't find any more answers anywhere else. is this something we should feedback to trello/butler?

[Iain Dooley]

@Daniel Tan you might find what you need in the usage or command logs:

https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/opening-the-usage-log/

https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/opening-the-command-log/

If you can't figure out the problem then yeah just go to trello.com/contact and send a question to support

[Daniel Tan]

there's no contact. its leads back to community

[Iain Dooley]

@Daniel Tan you just need to scroll to the bottom of the page to where it says "contact support"

[Daniel Tan]

yeah and when you click on it it leads right back to community. you can see for yourself