How to change the Jira board/filter owner of an inactive user?

[Rafik Bouizergane]

I want to change the Jira board owner, but it doesn't work. I think it has to do with the user being inactive. And if I do it the way you see below, I can't find the board/filter 

PS, I am an organizational administrator 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Agile-questions/Changing-a-Board-owner-as-a-system-admin/qaq-p/437899

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/How-to-I-remove-an-inactive-user-as-the-owner-of-a-board-in-Jira/qaq-p/1532981

[Ivan Lima]

Changing the filter ownership is how to make the change, as you correctly mentioned in the other posts. In this case, try following the steps in https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/jira-cloud-unable-to-change-or-delete-filters-owned-by-de-activated-or-deleted-users-1252001153.html. You should be able to make the change.

[Martin _Wayflare_]

Old thread, but it still gets steady search traffic, so adding a fuller answer for anyone who lands here.

The reason the change doesn't go through: a board is tied to its underlying filter, and the filter is what still belongs to the inactive user. Deactivating someone doesn't transfer anything they own. The owner just sticks until you move it.

The native fix is Settings > System > Shared items > Filters. Find the filter owned by the inactive user, change the owner, and the board follows. The catch is that Shared items only shows shared filters. If the person had private filters, those usually don't show up there at all, which is the annoying gap.

If you're comfortable with the API there's a free scripted route: with Administer Jira you can change a filter's owner even when the current owner is inactive, via PUT /rest/api/3/filter/{id}/owner with the new owner's accountId. Loop it if they owned several.

Disclosure: I work on a Forge app for exactly this case ("Leaver Cleanup & Owner Reassignment for Jira", by Wayflare), so I'm not neutral here. You pick the inactive user and it finds and reassigns what they own (filters including private ones via admin permissions, issue assignee and reporter, component and project leads) in one pass, then exports a CSV of what moved, which is useful if you keep offboarding records. Caveats: it covers those content types, not everything a user can own, and dashboards are out of scope in the current version (for those, the Shared items screen or the REST route still works). The CSV is a record of what was done, not a compliance guarantee. Other tools overlap with parts of this (user-merge apps, for example), so shop around.

If it's just this one board/filter, the Shared items screen is the two-minute fix.