Need a Way to Stop Auto-Assigning Followers & Bulk Remove Followers
Since a Follower's visibility overrides the Visibility hierarchy in Settings, you should provide a way for companies to prevent followers from being automatically added to records.
There is also a need to provide a way to remove Followers in bulk. Perhaps add that to the List view/bulk update option.
Thanks to anyone who takes time to read this. 
Comments
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Thanks for passing on this suggestion. How are you currently adding these followers automatically?
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Hi @Mike van der Valk Thank you for replying. The automatic addition of followers appears to be a default setting by Pipedrive. We have no workflow or backend automation to add followers, yet with every new deal, the owner is added automatically as a follower. I have found no way of stopping this from happening.
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Shanna Raper said:
Hi @Mike van der Valk Thank you for replying. The automatic addition of followers appears to be a default setting by Pipedrive. We have no workflow or backend automation to add followers, yet with every new deal, the owner is added automatically as a follower. I have found no way of stopping this from happening.
Okay I understand now. Indeed the owner is by default added as follower. Could you tell me why in your use case this is a bad thing? Just trying to understand it so I can pass on the feedback to our team.
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Shanna Raper said:
Hi @Mike van der Valk Thank you for replying. The automatic addition of followers appears to be a default setting by Pipedrive. We have no workflow or backend automation to add followers, yet with every new deal, the owner is added automatically as a follower. I have found no way of stopping this from happening.
Certainly. Thanks again for diving into this. Our company has strict security policies when it comes to customer data and how our own users access that data. Once a deal moves into X Pipeline, the ownership changes, and new data is entered into the Deal. That new data should not be accessed by the previous owner. The Visibility hierarchy allows for this security, but the fact that the previous owner was added as a follower by default completely overrides the company visibility settings. So we need a way to remove followers in bulk — but ideally, users should never be assigned as a follower to begin with.
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Shanna Raper said:
Hi @Mike van der Valk Thank you for replying. The automatic addition of followers appears to be a default setting by Pipedrive. We have no workflow or backend automation to add followers, yet with every new deal, the owner is added automatically as a follower. I have found no way of stopping this from happening.
Gotcha, so I assume the new owner just now manually removes the follower when they get a deal. You could potentially try out tools such as Zapier or Integromat to automate it or build on top of our open API as currently we don't have a native solution sorry
I've passed it on to our team though!0 -
@Mike van der Valk Thank you for having your team look into a possible solution.
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Hello, this is also an issue for my company. I'm acting as an admin for our team. I performed a bulk import of organizations & contacts for our entire sales team. When I reassigned the organization to the appropriate sales person it did not remove me as a follower. It seems I'll need to manually remove myself from each organization & contact. When I reassign an organization it does not seem to carry through to the related contacts. Is that true?
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Hello, this is also an issue for my company. I'm acting as an admin for our team. I performed a bulk import of organizations & contacts for our entire sales team. When I reassigned the organization to the appropriate sales person it did not remove me as a follower. It seems I'll need to manually remove myself from each organization & contact. When I reassign an organization it does not seem to carry through to the related contacts. Is that true?
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"Followers" is a super annoying feature that makes owner-only/private sales processes messy without custom automation. (if you reassign deals to other sales agents sometimes, things get messy quick!)
Problem:
When a deal is created, the owner gets automatically added as a follower. When you change owners the old owner is not removed and the new one is added. So now there are 2 followers of a deal that is supposed to only have 1 owner. So if you plan on trusting the owner-only visibility group... guess again lol.
@Shanna Raper Here is how i'm solving this issue until they give us an option to completely turn off the "followers" feature. @Mike van der Valk 😉 @Manuel Oliveira @Inês Batata
Solution:
1. Webhook on deal updates, filter for owner changes (current: owner != previous: owner). This eats a ton of bandwidth on my side because pipedrive also does not allow you to filter their webhooks by individual field changes. Then once the webhook is received get that deal's followers and delete all the followers.
If you really want to save data, you can retrofit Pipedrive's native automation with conditions to only send deal owner changes via an email as a sort of mailhook or the same with their slack integration as a slackhook. Then listen for either of those "hooks", then parse the text for the Deal ID, then hit the same 2 endpoints above to delete all followers of that deal.
2. With reoccurring API hit every few minutes to handle any missed webhook payload. You can create multiple workflows with different frequencies based on deal status to save bandwidth like you don't need to hit lost/won deals as often or at all like open deals.
Use these endpoints in this order:
- List Deals (filter for followerCount > 0)
- List Followers
- Delete a Follower (delete all followers by id)
I assume, before my time, It was a sad day when the "Followers" feature was added on top of visibility controls LOL, what's the point of visibility control if this overrides those settings?0
