Main administrator lost project permissions?

Question

We currently use Bitbucket for all our repositories. I decided to register a JIRA trial under our administrating email account.

At first things were fine where I could create projects and assign issues.

All of a sudden I login and can't view projects from the drop down list in the top left menu. I then tried to create a new project and received this message:

Permission Violation

It seems that you have tried to perform an operation which you are not permitted to perform.

If you think this message is wrong, please contact your JIRA administrators.

When I browse to the projects from the top right gear icon I can see the project I just created and this main administrator as Project lead. Yet I still cant access the newly created project from the top left menu?

At 1 point I moved our developers out of the administrators group but never touched the administrator. I also deleted a project I had previously created as a test. Somewhere along the line my access bombed out.

Crazy thing is when I click the JIRA administrators link in the above error and send a message it sends an email to the account which is the main administrator which is logged in? Makes no sense? I send myself an email to try change permissions but I cant do anything about it?

Norman Abramovitz · Answer

You are use to the concept that the administrator sees all.   In general, this security model is being phased out because it leaves systems vunerable to attacks.   Why should an administrator see and change all projects in the system?  There is not one type of an administrator.  You can have a project administrator that changes workflows and you can operational adminstrators responsible for storage and backups.  The operational administrator should never care about projects.  A project administrator might only be responsible for a few projects and should not see other projects.

Without seeing your exact roles/groups to permission relationships, I cannot say exactly why, but my guess is your roles build upon each other.  You lost permissions to view projects.

ilogic agency · Answer

Okay ive figured it out... IMO these seems like a huge bug or maybe I just dont understand project role hierarchy?

I was fiddling and saw that project roles for this administrator that the Users column was unticked but the Administrators and Developers columns were ticked. Once I ticked Users on the projects suddenly appeared in the top left menu and the issues dropdown has now also appeared?

This does not make sense to me? Surely an administrator would have top level permissions meaning he would be able to access all role type access?