Any way to set an inactive user as Assignee on an issue in Jira Cloud?

[eirens]

We have some issues that are old and still marked open, but they're done. I want to set them to the person who worked on them and then I want to close them.

I can't do this if that user, who no longer works here, has an inactive account.

Any way around this? Maybe a setting? Knowing who handled the issue is part of having great records.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, you can only assign to active users.  This does make a lot of sense - if someone is inactive, they're not going to do anything about the issue because you've deliberately said they're not relevant to your organisation any more.

But your situation does make sense and I can see exactly why you're asking.  There's potentially a long conversation, but I think I have landed on " @eirens is trying to clean up some old data, making it more clear for reporting on who did what, when and why, and assigning (now) inactive users to old issues makes perfect sense". 

I am afraid this is an edge-case though, and not possible.  I think @John Funk has the only useful answer - for each person, re-enable them, bulk-edit, then disable them again.  If you do it one person at a time, you're only adding one licence temporarily, which won't cost unless you're right at the top of a tier.

[eirens]

Thank you. I am indeed at the exact edge of a big Jira pricing tier cliff. So I'll just wait till something more important pushes me over the cliff.

[John Funk]

Hi @eirens

The only way I know to do it is to make the user active again, update the records and then make the user inactive again. That seems to work. 

[eirens]

I'm avoiding that as it adds the cost of that user.

[John Funk]

I don’t think it will add any cost if it is only active a few hours.

[eirens]

Neat. Thank you.