search for comments added to tickets by a specific person

[Melissa_Liotta]

In this ticket I see that in 2017 there was no out of the box way to search for any comments added to a ticket by a specific user...

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/How-do-I-search-for-comments-by-a-specific-user/qaq-p/647091

has this ever been addressed so we can do this type of search with no additional plugins?

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hi Melissa,

there is not a native JQL to search for comments by a specific user, and you would want to look into an add-on with extended JQL functionality to do this in JQL directly, a workaround used by many is to use the activity stream gadget on a dashboard for the desired users updates as described here.

There are a lot of add-on apps that can do this in Jira Server as described in the link above as alternatives to the activity stream workaround but in Jira Cloud I am only aware of the JIRA JQL Pro Add-On for this function Additional details can be seen in the vendors documentation here:

•  Find by Comment Author

Regards,
Earl

[Melissa_Liotta]

Hello Earl,

I tried to do a search by author and I received an error.  I am an admin so I guess it does not exist in our version. 

Error received is:

Field 'fields.comment.comments.author.emailAddress' does not exist or you do not have permission to view it.

Thank you,

Melissa

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Melissa,

I understand that you would like to search for comments added by a specific user in JIRA. Is it correct? Or are you looking to return issues commented by a specific user?

The reason I ask this question is that the JQL functionality of JIRA is designed to return Issues instead of comments, so there is no way to perform a global search for those comments directly in JIRA.

That been said, to search for comments added by a specific person in a specific issue you can perform the steps below:

- Navigate to the issue > Click in the comments tab > type command F to use the browser finder 

- Type the name of the user which performed the comments. The browser finder will display all the comments performed by the user

To perform the same search on multiple issues:

- Create a filter displaying all the issues you want to search for comments

- Export your issues to a CSV file (All fields)

- Use a spreadsheet software (Excel, LibreOffice, etc) to search in the comments columns for the username of the user that performed the comments. The username will appear after the comment time and before the comment body, between ";" like in the screenshot below (Admin):

Let me know if you have any questions.

[Melissa_Liotta]

Hello Petterson, 

That will not help.  We are trying to generate a list of all of the tickets that a specific user user added a comment(s) to.  From there we can sort by project to see what all projects the user has been working on. 

Thank you, 

Melissa