Jira Agile Board not showing assignee with his/her inital avatar (Jira Datacenter 8.0.3)

Question

When accessing Jira boards (i.e. Scrum/Kanban), some of the issues' assignees are not showing his/her initial as the avatar.  I was under the assumption that if users never change his/her default avatar for his/her profile that Jira will always display the his/her initial as the avatar.

How can we resolve this issue to have all assignees' avatar to be his/her initials for the users who never changed his/her default avatars in his/her profile.

See image below -

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira Functional Lead

Viasat Inc.

Joseph Chung Yin · Answer

We were always in DataCenter in our instance.  Just don't understand that if users never change his/her avatar that some users will have his/her First Initial show up automatically and some will not.

Thanks for your input.

Best, Joseph

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Joseph,

I understand you have some users that don't have their expected avatar on the board.  And that you would want to default users that have not configured an avatar to use their initials instead.

For Jira Server and Data Center:

Defaulting a user's avatar to their initials has actually never been a feature of Server or Data Center products.  But there is a feature request for that in JRASERVER-37543 - Option to replace default avatar with user initials.

However in Jira Cloud:

This is something that can happen for users that don't choose an avatar.

So perhaps if you migrated your Jira instance from Cloud to Data Center (or Server) at some point it is possible that you might have carried those default avatars over for those existing users.  The problem would be that any new users created after this migration won't be able to default to their initials.

The good news is, that in Jira Server/ Data Center, as a system administrator, you can actually set these avatars on behalf of the users if you wanted to.   You could visit the Jira URL /secure/ViewProfile.jspa?name=exampleusernamehere and you can set that user's avatar.   Which might feasible if you have just a few users you want to set.  If you have a lot of users, I would instead recommend something like creating an announcement banner message to try to guide these users to pick their own avatar to help every quickly identify users at a glance on the site.

Please let me know if this helps.

Andy