Canned 'Unassigned' user that comes with Jira seems to be gone

[Dan Maxwell]

We are going from a very customized instance of Jira to more of an out-of-the-box approach since we are eyeing agile a bit more seriously, and one thing I notice in our sandbox version we spin up for testing is that there's an 'Unassigned' user that seems to come with Jira from the get-go.

We had the 'Allow Unassigned Issues' option turned off on our current production Jira for some reason, and when I turn that back on in our prod-copy TEST region, the canned unassigned user that comes with Jira does not show, but all the custom unassigned users we've created over the years do.

We would like to consolidate those unassigned users into one now to make that easier to deal with, and I would much rather have it be the out-of-the-box user than one of our custom users. Is there something I need to do to make that user show up, or is it gone forever?

[Matt Doar · Accepted solution]

I think Unassigned just means that the Assignee is null underneath the covers. No such user as "Unassigned" in the cwd_user table. So clearing the Assignee should make the Unassigned user reappear, if it is globally enabled

[Jack Brickey]

correct and you can check for "unassigned" in jql using "Assignee Is Empty" for example.

[Dan Maxwell]

Much appreciated! After some digging around, we got Unassigned to show again by switching the Default Assignee of a project to the canned Unassigned (not sure why it was there suddenly), and once that happened, we could see Unassigned everywhere we needed to.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Matt is right, there is no "canned unassigned" user, it really does mean the field is empty.

If it vanished, then my best guess would be an admin accidentally turned off "allow unassigned issues", so the option would have vanished.