In Jira Cloud app for Slack, how do I get rid of the previews for all messages?

Lasse Laakkonen

This annoying feature has appeared sometime in the past few months.

In this thread https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Were-there-changes-to-Jira-Cloud-app-for-Slack-for-Guest/qaq-p/1188605 there is discussion of similar things and Atlassian says "This is new functionality we've just shipped". So something has changed recently.

The issue:

When ever a message is posted to Slack, which contains a link to a Jira issue, Jira Cloud ALWAYS nags about linking the Jira account so that it could show a preview. I do not want Jira issue previews in all channels.

How do I get rid of that nagging message which fills the channels?

I still want to use the Jira-Slack integration to get specific items to a specific channel - this is working as it should.

Sean Waters

Hi Lasse,

The reason we are asking you to login is to enable interactivity with Jira from within Slack. This interactivity manifests in a few ways:

• The most obvious way is through what is called unfurling. When you share a link to an issue or an issue key in a channel where you are subscribed (receiving notifications about issues) to that key's project we will attach a brief summary of the issue to your message including the summary and status information so that there is shared context about the issue with others in the channel. This way you can mention an issue and others won't need to switch context to Jira in their browser to know what issue you are talking about.
• Beyond unfurling, when you have linked your Jira account to your Slack account you are able to interact with issues from directly within Slack via the ... menu on each issue message we send. This means that if someone shares a link to an issue you (or someone else in the channel) can assign, comment, transition, or watch the issue all within Slack. Obviously to do this in a secure manner we need to know your identity on the Jira side to be sure you are authorized to perform these actions.
• Logging in will also allow you to create new subscriptions and unlock future functionality.

In order to give you the best experience possible with our application we really need to know your identity in both Jira and Slack and this is the only way for us to accomplish this. It can be hard to explain all of this in a short prompt, but I wanted to give you the full context here.

Should you decide there is functionality you want from our app that doesn't involve you being logged in, we have made a few changes that should make this experience less frustrating:

1. After we have prompted you 3 times to login due to sharing a link you will be given an additional button to defer login. This will silence the login prompts for awhile and when we do check in again you will always have the option to say Not Now, we promise not to nag too much, but we don't want you to be locked out.
2. If you just don't like the unfurling feature and don't want it in your channel you can type `/jira unfurl` in the channel where you want the feature disabled and you will be given the option to disable it in that channel.