How can I get permission to everything?

[John Hinnegan]

I'm our Jira admin for the online version. I need to remove a user, so I need to change all the issues he's reported on or is assigned to. However:

NOTE: You do not have permission to edit the selected 74 issues or at least one issue has a status that forbids editing.

How can I give the administrators group "all permissions"?

PS, with a list of 74 issues, it would be nice if there were a way to know which ones I don't have access to.

[J. Caldwell · Accepted solution]

You normally don't "remove" users unless they have nothing associated with them. Mark them as "inactive" with the check box and that should prevent them from doing anything.

Why don't you want to remove them? Because things disappear and you lose some of the trackibility in Jira. If someone made a comment and was part of a discussion, removing that user would cause you to lose those. Moving the tickets to someone else just results in someone else getting hit with things that they may nothing about.

[Daniel Wester]

+1 to just deactivating the user.

I don't think you'll lose the comments - but you'll get errors in the logs because the username can't be found (or at least you used to).

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yup, you really don't want to remove users if you can avoid it. It leaves stomping great holes throughout your data and makes it quite ugly on reporting. You won't loose any data, but you will provoke errors, as Daniel says.

Far better to deactivate them.

[John Hinnegan]

I want to remove the person because they're not with the company any more.

On what page do I find the "inactive" check box?

[Daniel Wester]

See https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Managing+Users#ManagingUsers-Deactivatingauser

[John Hinnegan]

Those docs appear incorrect for my version of Jira. We're using hosted. When I click edit, I can see only "Full Name" and "Email"

[Daniel Wester]

For OnDemand: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Managing+application+access#Managingapplicationaccess-GrantingForExistingUserGrantingandrevokingapplicationaccessforanexistinguser

[John Hinnegan]

Thank you. Got it working. For reference on the on demand link, it's now called User Management, not Global Users (for me at least). Also, the image of the cog icon is broken.

[John Hinnegan]

1 more followup question. Don't I pay per user with the on-demand product? Will not deleting this user cost me money?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, you don't lose money really. User numbers are capped, not allocated.

If you delete, or deactivate a user (so they cannot log in), then their "seat" goes back into the pool. If you've got (say) a 10 user licence, you'll be able to add, or re-activate, up to 10 users. You won't be able to add another user after that. If you delete or de-activate say the third and fifth users you originally added, then you'll be able to add another two.

[John Hinnegan]

thanks for clearing that up

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You probably can't.

There are two warnings in that sentence, which is mildly annoying, but...

1) You do not have permission to edit - that means you don't have the rights in one or more projects. Admins do not automatically get any project rights (admin can do anything is a very badly broken security model), so you need to plough through each project and possibly update your membership

2) Status that forbids editing - this usually means "issue is closed", but that's not always the case. There's a flag you can stick on a status that prevents edit, and it's utterly irrelevant what permissions you have - you can't edit. To fix these, you either need to edit the workflow, or move the issues out of the flagged status.