limiting access to a board in a free Trello account

[Floy Parkhill]

I created a free Trello account with two boards and 6 users.  I want to limit access to one of the boards to only two of the users.  Since everyone is an "admin" in a free account, is this possible? 

[Floy Parkhill · Accepted solution]

I synthesized the advice I received into this answer, which makes the most sense to me:

If you want to have Board members who don't have Team administrative abilities, remove them from the Team and leave them on their current Boards.  Invite new users to the Boards only, not the Team.  They'll show up as Guests of the Team.

Members of your Boards who are not part of your Team will be limited to their Board capabilities.

[Iain Dooley]

@Floy Parkhill team administrative rights and board administrative rights are separate. You can create boards in a team that aren't team viewable (or that are team viewable but don't allow self-join) and then you can add only some team members to those board. 

[Shyam Reyal]

If the 6 members and two boards are in a team, then I'm afraid it is not possible. 

The easiest thing to do would be to move one of the boards out of the team (make it a personal board), and remove the 4 users that you don't want.

[Floy Parkhill]

I did more research on this question while waiting for an answer and am now utterly confused, since I saw so many responses in a couple of threads speaking to this very issue, explaining how this can easily be done by removing users from the Team, but leaving them on the board I want them to have access to. 

[Floy Parkhill]

Here's the most lucid explanation I found and I think it's from Atlassian Support:

This change only affects adminship at the team level, which is different than board adminship - control over boards is something free team admins never had, and still don’t. In other words, while free team admins can view team-visible boards, they can’t do things like change board visibility, delete the board, or remove board members. That is reserved for board admins, who are usually the board creators. You can learn more about what team admins can do here: https://help.trello.com/article/1215-team-admin-permissions.

Similarly, members of your boards who are not a part of your team will not suddenly gain more abilities - they will continue to be limited to their current board capabilities.

If you are still concerned about certain team members having additional abilities at the team-level, you can always remove them from the team but keep them as members on any relevant boards.

[Shyam Reyal]

@Floy Parkhill The questions I have are

* do you want all 6 members on a team?
* do you want both the board as team boards on this team?

If you're using free teams, then both of these cannot be YES at the same time. You have to either

* remove 4 members from the team, and add them to the first board as guests, OR
* remove the second board from the team, an remove everyone but the two users you want to give access to