How to hide done/closed epics from the Epics Link field on tasks/issues?

[Dave Furlani]

This affects Company-Managed and Team managed projects as best I can tell.

I have several epics in a Done status (literally, status = "Done"), and Resolution = "Done", and all child tasks are in a Done statusCategory. I have "Show closed epics" unticked, and yet our old, long finished with epics still appear when using the Epic Link field on an issue. It's just noise. It makes selecting the right harder, and selecting the wrong epic a definite likelihood, which of course messes with planning and clarity.  

The project the epics live in are often different to the project the issue lives in, so does not appear in the Epics list in the project's scrum board, and honestly, that shouldn't matter because many teams use Kanban boards instead, which don't have that thin Epic's list.

This is a Jira bug and/or there's a secret that Atlassian need to share with everyone to stop Done epics appearing in the Epic Link field of task level issues. Atlassian have a large team and must have thousands of Done epics. How do they do it? What's the trick? Is there one?

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

The reason done epics are showing up in the epic link field is because epics are a bit different from other issues in that besides the normal status it also has an epic status, and that is what controls if it should show up in that list or not. Have a look at this KB on how you can fix this by using a post function if you have access one of the two mentioned apps. This can also be done via automation, have a look at this thread on how to do it.

[Dave Furlani]

A4J fix confirmed. Thanks for the links @Mikael Sandberg 

[Ben Osheroff]

I also have this issue.  I believe my project is a "Next-Gen" project, and I can't seem to figure out how to prevent done epics from showing up in "+ Epic" button in the backlog.  I've futzed with the workflow, the "Epic Status" field seems totally non-editable (says "not applicable for this type of project).  Is there a definitive answer here?  It feels like JIRA took away "epic status" from newer projects but... not totally clear.

[Mikael Sandberg]

@Ben Osheroff This should be it's own question. What you see is a list of recent issues, and epics are not removed from that list just because you have marked it as done, since you can still view the epic.