Project not delete has no accessible issues

[Luca]

I have a bunch of projects that I've not using for a few months and now I can't access any issues as if they disappeared. I can access the setting but if I try to load the issues it says that the project is inaccessible. I also lost the ability to add them to the favorites. And about the favorites, now two projects are acting as one, if I fav one the other gets marked too.

What is happening? Am I losing access to old projects?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Luca 

Are you able to login to your site?

Are you able to see a list of Project for the site? Can you navigate to the Projects menu and select View all projects and find a list of projects? Are the affected projects on the list?

Do any other users have access to your site?

There are a variety of things that may have happened.

If you are not able to login to your site, or are trying to use saved links to access projects and getting "not accessible" messages, then your site may have been deactivated. A Free site that has no activity for an extended period of time will be deactivated by Atlassian. You can find the details about that in the answer on this post.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/If-your-site-continues-to-remain-inactive-it-will-be-deactivated/td-p/2043944

If you are able to login to your site and the projects are not listed on the View all projects page, the projects may have been deleted. That would have been done by a user with Admin access to your Jira instance, not by Atlassian. You can check the project Trash bin to see if the projects are there. Deleted projects will remain in the Trash bin for 60 days before being permanently deleted. Refer to

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/restore-a-project-from-trash/

[Luca]

 - Are you able to login to your site?

Yes

 - Are you able to see a list of Project for the site?

Yes, all of them

 - Can you navigate to the Projects menu and select View all projects and find a list of projects?

Again, Yes

 - Are the affected projects on the list?

Yes, they are

 - Do any other users have access to your site?

We all and we all can't access the tickets

I can access the projects settings and see them everywhere. No one can access the issues. One of those projects was last active in November 2023.

I get that the free version I'm using can disable old stuff but most of it was active last year...

[Luca]

Thanks for your help BTW :-)

[Luca]

The four highlighted have problem

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Luca 

Jira does not automatically disable projects, even in the Free version. That is not the explanation for this problem.

When you try to navigate to one of those projects, what is the error message you see? And what is the actual URL to which you are sent?

When I hover over a project name in the Projects list, the URL I see at the bottom of the browser is:

https://<myBaseURL>/browse/<projectKey>

However, when I click on the project name, and I have selected a project that has boards associated with it, then I am automatically redirected to the board that I last accessed related to that project.

https://<myBaseURL>/jira/software/c/projects/<projectKey>/boards/48

I could get a "not accessible" type of message if that board had been deleted, or if the filter that board used was deleted or not shared with me. The issues may still exist in the project, while the real problem is the board or filter to which you are being automatically redirected.

Try going to the Issues > View all issues screen and searching for issues in one of those projects. Do you get any results?

[Luca]

This is the link

https://<host>/jira/software/c/projects/DRB/issues

And this is what I get

Thank you again for your attention!

[Luca]

For the default link to the project "https://<myBaseURL>/browse/DRB"

I get

[Luca]

But as you can see the project DRB is in my list of projects and should be active.

[Trudy Claspill]

Thank you for that information.

The next thing to check is the Permissions for the project. Navigate to this page:

https://<yourBaseURL>//secure/admin/ViewPermissionSchemes.jspa

Look through that list for the DRB project listed in the Projects column, i.e.

When you find it, click on the Permissions link in the Actions column. What do you then see in the Grant to column for the Browse Projects permission?

Also, do you see this warning in the upper right corner?

[Luca]

This is what I see

[Trudy Claspill]

Your problem is that the Permission for Browse Projects has been granted to Users, which is a Project Role. But in the Free version you cannot assign users to Roles. Since you can't be assigned to the Users role, you don't have permission to see the content of the project.

It is technically possible to create a permission scheme like this in the Free version and associate it to a project. In doing so you end up taking away the permissions for most users.

It is also possible that if you were previously on a paid version or using a Trial of the Standard or Premium version you would've been able to set up Permission Schemes and assigned user to Project Roles. If you then reverted to a Free version, the Role assignment that already existed should've been retained and the Permission scheme should work for those projects.

However you would not be able to update Role assignments in projects after reverting to Free, so the Permission Scheme might not work to grant access to users added to the instance.

The fix is to change the project to use a Permission Scheme where the permissions are assigned to Any Logged In User instead of using project roles.

[Luca]

Thank you Trudy. The change to the Free plan happen long ago. I recently removed groups of uses associated with no one and that seems to have triggered the situation. I would happily change to one of the new Permission Schemes that seems working fine.

The question is: How can I?

[Trudy Claspill]

You will need to upgrade to a free Trial of the Standard plan in order to assign a more open permission scheme to the projects.

The default permission scheme for Company Managed projects in a Free Plan is to give all permissions to "Any logged in user" and to the project role "atlassian-addons-project-access".

I have seen that project role also called "atlassian-addons-admin", so look at existing permission schemes to see which name is in use in your environment.

[Luca]

Hi Trudy

Thank you so much for your help. The problem was indeed the missing "Any logged in user" authorization subject.

Not nice that when I got automatically migrated to the free account, that authorization wasn't automatically added to my "Default Permission Scheme" which is/was what it sounds :-)

Anyway, I'll burn my 14 days and I'll be back to normal.

Thanks again

Luca