These are two of the biggest issues we have with labels.
* They are global. They should follow the same architecture as almost everything else in Jira. You have a "scheme" which can be associated with projects. That would allow sharing of "label" schemes.
* Any user can create a label, which means there is a 100% chance of them getting misspelled. There should be an option to only allow certain users to add new labels to each "schema". i.e. each schema could have a group that is a "Label" manager.
We considered using multi-select, BUT, multi-select interface is terrible. If there was an option to render a multi-select with a label style selection interface, and that would allow adding new multi-select items on the fly, pretty much every problem would be solved.
We might look at plugins, but most plugins have pricing based on the number of users. We have a large number of "users" because of Confluence. We also have two business units, and only one business unit is likely to use the plugin. We would have to make the argument that it's worth paying a couple hundred a month for a new plugin, that only maybe 10% or less of our users will ever need.
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