Fully Deleting Users From Jira

James Bourne

We are attempting to migrate from on prem Jira to Jira Cloud. We have inactive users that we want to purge prior to the migration. We are getting the following message:

Cannot delete user. 'user' has associations in Jira that cannot be removed automatically.

We have had a Duckduckgo and there appears to be no definitive way to fully delete users in Jira? This problem appears to have been going on since at least 2013. Surely this cannot be the case? Otherwise, we would have to painstakingly work through thousands of items and reassign / delete them.

Is there any workaround or way to fully delete a user and re-assign or delete their comments, assigned and reported issues?

Thanks in advance.

Earl McCutcheon

Hello @James Bourne ,

The following Document details what you need to do to delete a user:

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/create-edit-or-remove-a-user-938847025.html

Just like @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- noted "It can get very very complicated" highlighted in the section at the bottom of the documentation for deleting a user:

Delete a user

We recommend you think carefully before deleting a Jira user. Consider deactivating instead and see the section above for more information. 

Before you delete, note that:

• You cannot delete a user from within Jira if you are using External User Management (However, you can deactivate the user. See instructions above).
• You cannot delete a user from Jira if they have:
  • reported or been assigned to any issues.
  • commented on any issues.
• The filters and dashboards of a user will be deleted when the user is deleted, even if the filters or dashboards are shared with other users.
• All issues that have been reported by or assigned to the user you are attempting to delete, are respectively hyperlinked to a list of the individual issues in the Issue Navigator.

The key takeaways are that to be able to delete a user, that account is tied to all the data they created for the data integrity portion of issue tracking and history events, so you first need to remove all the data associated with that user from all the issue they worked on in the form of comments, and assignments, owned filters, and issues the user created.  so the recommendation for preserving the data is to deactivate the user instead to avoid having to perform the data cleanup and preserve the chain of information tied to the original account.  Alternatively, you need to first go through and manually delete/modify the issues and data associated with the user before deleting them.

Then if you do choose to delete the account vs deactivation, just below that portion it gives the steps to delete the user in an expand macro, noting:

1. Select Administration () > User Management and find the user in the user list.
2. Click the Delete link in the Operations column.
   The confirmation screen that follows will summarize any involvement of that user in the system by showing current issues assigned to and reported by that user, etc. These connections between the user and other parts of the system may prevent the deletion of that user.
3. Take any actions required to disassociate the user with Jira. The error message will give you exact instructions but these may include:
   • Reassigning any issues currently assigned to the user.
   • Bulk-editing the issues created by the user and changing the 'Reporter' to someone else. You will also need to allow editing of closed issues if some of the issues the user created are closed and you do not wish to reopen them.
   • Changing the owner of shared dashboards owned by the user. See Managing dashboards.
   • Changing the project lead for any projects where the user is a lead.
4. If there are no issues assigned to, or reported by the user, and the user has not commented on any issues, the confirmation screen will display a Delete button. Click to delete the user.

Regards,
Earl