Reordering checklists just got harder

[Paul Taylor]

Hi! I track my daily tasks in a weekly Trello card that has eight checklists - one for each day of the week, and one labeled Carry On that I copy from week to week to bring incomplete tasks with me. The Carry On list can get quite long. I usually use Trello in Chrome on Windows 11. 

When the week starts, it is my practice to drag and drop the Carry On list up underneath the Sunday checklist so I can move items off of it and onto the Sunday list. Then on Monday, I drag the Monday checklist up from below the Carry On list so it will be above it, and I can move tasks from Sunday and from Carry On to plan my Monday.

The Carry On list usually has more than a screen's worth of tasks on it, so I can't drag Monday all the way to the top of Carry On to drop it. For a long time that didn't matter, because if I dragged Monday up a little and dropped it on the bottom half of the Carry On list, it would snap to the the top of Carry On. 

A couple of weeks ago, that stopped working. Now when I drag Monday up and drop it on the bottom of the Carry On list, it snaps back to the bottom. Trying to drag Carry On down also doesn't work; it snaps back to where it was. There is no way now to reorder the checklists if one of them has more than a screen's worth of items.

I have to go in on Android to reorder, where the behavior is different; on Android, when you start dragging a checklist, all the lists collapse to just the headers until you drop it, which is really nice! It would be great if the browser version worked the same way, but I would be happy for it to just go back to the way it worked previously.

If anyone has a way for me to reorder my checklists in the browser, I would be very grateful!

[Gaurav Kataria · Accepted solution]

Thanks for reporting it @Paul Taylor. We are working on fixing it.

[Paul Taylor]

Thanks, @Gaurav Kataria!

[Raymond Wang]

Hi @Paul Taylor, thanks for writing in. We just shipped a change to enable automatic scrolling on the card back while you drag an element across it that might help a bit.

I tried making the change to automatically collapse checklists while dragging, but in practice the experience doesn't feel quite as good in the browser experience (compared to Android or iOS). We're going to take this suggestion back to the shop and spend some time refining the ideal solution here.

Unfortunately, the change in behavior to drop target ordering was indeed intentional, as we received feedback from other users that the previous experience was confusing. Now, dragging and dropping checklists is more consistent with the rest of Trello — if you drag one checklist to the top of another checklist, it will be rearranged above; otherwise, it will be rearranged below. I recognize that this is a change for your workflow.

We'll do our best to find a better solution. In the meantime, the Android app is a great workaround. Alternatively, I wonder if automatically repeating lists and cards (in place of checklists and checklist items) might suit your use case better? Here's our documentation on automations in Trello; the Card Repeater Power-Up may also be a good fit for your workflow.

[Paul Taylor]

Thanks @Raymond Wang, I really appreciate the personal attention! I will try your recommended alternatives.

I'm not sure I followed "automatic scrolling on the card back while you drag an element across it." If I could get the screen to scroll up when I'm dragging the bottom checklist up over the long one, that would suffice. As it is, there is just no way to get to the top of the checklist to drop and reorder, because the top is off the screen, and dragging the bottom checklist up doesn't make it scroll. (I just retested this, by the way; if what you meant is that the card should scroll up when the bottom checklist is dragged up, that is not currently happening.)

Thanks again for the careful help; I will check out the alternatives you mentioned. 

[Paul Taylor]

@Raymond Wang Thank you for the automatic scrolling feature! That has resolved my issue completely, and I like the new behavior better than the old.

Thanks again!