Is there a variable in butler for all board members?
Asked by shessweb:

I'm trying to create a card button that will add all members on my board to a card when used, but I don't see any variable for {boardmemberusernames} or similar. Everything I can find is for card members or the member performing the action.

I tried using a wildcard variable and it didn't work. The only other way I can think to do it is with a brute-force method: to add lots of actions to the button to add each board member one at a time, which seems very inefficient.

Am I missing anything? Is there a way that a board member variable could be easily added if it doesn't already exist?


Answers:
author: Esme Crutchley
body: Hi [@shessweb](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3841371)

Welcome to the Community!

You could create a rule, or card button to do this.

For a rule, you could have something like: when a card is added to the board, add \[and then list the usernames - which should appear from a drop down of everyone that's already on the board\] (I only have one other person on my team/board - so mine looks a little thin on the ground!):

![Screenshot 2020-05-01 at 12.34.58.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/93087i2D91FDC4112E1798/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2020-05-01 at 12.34.58.png")

You could have a card button that does the same thing:

![Screenshot 2020-05-01 at 12.35.29.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/93088iEF5279292680A693/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2020-05-01 at 12.35.29.png")

Obviously, if you only want specific people under specific circumstances - then you could change the rule to trigger on something more narrow e.g. when a card is added to list "something" with the green "something" label - then add these people. A card button wouldn't be able to distinguish this because it's 'just' a button.

But either of these options would work!

Esme :)

comments: author: shessweb
body: Thanks [@Esme Crutchley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3555478)!

This is essentially what I've done for now for one board, but I have several Team boards that I'm managing that I have to do the same thing for. Plus, we're continuing to add new people to our team and various boards within so I have to then go and update the rules/buttons on each relevant board every time we add a new member. (See my reply to [@Iain Dooley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1416112) for more explanation.)

It would make my life much easier to just have one generic button across all boards that would add all of the current members of a given board at once!


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@shessweb](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3841371) I don't think there's a way to do that with Butler, can I ask the use case? You can notify everyone with a comment using the @board keyword

comments: author: shessweb
body: Thanks [@Iain Dooley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1416112). I'm part of a research group that is trying to organize a new science center, which has smaller sub-teams for particular branches of our research field. There are about 35 of us total at the moment, and each sub-team has about 10 people (with some overlap).

We have some cards indicating tasks that everyone needs to perform, either across the entire center (our main board) or for individual teams (research-specific boards). With so many of us working together, it is time consuming and a bit tedious to individually add each board member to one card, especially on our central board.

We are also slowly adding new members to our center, and they in turn join their research team(s), so I end up going in to edit all of the specific butler functions that I've written for each specific research team. (I'm the resident Trello "expert" for the center since I've been using it for several years already myself).

I would *love* a way to add every member that has joined a given board so that I don't have to have my own "To-Do" list full of updating Butler actions for everyone else! :)


author: shessweb
body: Also, I tried to use @board in the Butler action instead of a member name, but it wouldn't accept that as input for a member specification.


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@shessweb](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3841371) you use @board in a comment, which will notify everyone, it won't add everyone.

You can create a Butler command libraries to ease the burden of creating the same commands all over the place:

<https://help.trello.com/article/1139-command-libraries>

If you have some tasks in a board that everyone needs to do, could you just create a list called "Everyone do this" and then when each person does it, they vote on the card to indicate they're done?

The only advantage to having everyone as a member of those cards is if you had to have the cards that everyone was assigned to spread out in multiple lists, or if you wanted people to be able to see them from the Cards view.

If you really really want to add all board members to a given card, you could use this Trellinator function which adds all board members to a card when you apply the "Everyone" label:

<https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/b11c6e76d4aff1b453bcba71125a375a>

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>


Tags: butler

variable