How do anonymous users work?

[Brendan Gray]

How do anonymous users actually get linked to my project? If I wanted to ensure someone could find my project (by them being an anonymous user) how would I do that? Is there a link they need to click? Is there some special portal. Can someone explain? I was advised to functionality was good because it allows customers to be involved in the project.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>How do anonymous users actually get linked to my project? 

They don't.  

An anonymous user is someone who has not logged in, so Jira does not know who they are.  There's no account for them, there's nothing in the system that identifies them.  You can't add them to projects or anything else like that because there's nothing there to do that with.

Anonymous users use Jira in the same way that licenced users do.  There's code in Jira that says "if the admins have said I should, then I can treat an anonymous user as though they were licenced".   You do that by using "everyone" or "anonymous" in the permission schemes.

Note that we all strongly recommend that you never allow anonymous users to write.  Let them view things only, never update - if they have any form of edit/update, then you lose the audit trail, kind of defeating the point of Jira being an issue tracker...  (and it opens you up to spam)

[Brendan Gray]

Thank you. I understand.

But how do I get someone to be able to see the project as an anonymous user? I have made the changes to permissions, so how do they now view it? Do I need to send them a link?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

An anonymous user is no different to a licenced user when it comes to how they use Jira.  Fire it up in a browser.

[Brendan Gray]

Can an anonymous user see the roadmap and plans and things like that? I tested it now and all I can see is a list of issues.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Roadmaps and plans are functions that required licenced access, I don't think they support anonymous access like projects do.

[Brendan Gray]

Thank you.