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Mention and Assignee search don't return accurate users

Stephen Hodgson

We have a distributed team, so some users are in other orgs where their display name is managed for them by their corporate directory (e.g. display name set to Kanji) and some users are standalone Atlassian Cloud accounts where each user can set whatever name they want (e.g. first name only, nickname, etc.).

The mentions and assignee fields' type-ahead search (I'm sure this applies to other fields as well) only searches the user's display name so these features are rendered ineffective (at best) to our team. If these would search the email addresses as well (and display the email alongside the display names the search returns), there wouldn't be any issue here.

Support pointed me towards https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-82097, but this ticket seems inaccurate from the start since it claims some fields do search email today (they don't in my cloud instance).

Is there anything we can do to work around this issue? This is certainly a disappointing downgrade from our Jira server experience where

We had more control over the display names
Mentions search included the username
Mentions search showed the display name, email address, and user name

Accepted answers

Stephen Hodgson

This is just another hole in the Atlassian Cloud solution that is a major step back from the on-prem experience. The "resolution" to our support ticket was a new "suggestion" ticket that Atlassian make the mention and assignee user search useable for distributed teams: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-84698

The Atlassian Admin/Guard team got the memo on this problem and user searches in the admin section (e.g. for group assignment) both search and return the email address as well as the user's display name while Confluence and Jira both don't show or search enough information to find the correct users.

All comments

Jehan Bhathena

Hi @Stephen Hodgson

I can search for users using email in my instance, using jql, like assignee = user@donain.com.

Can you perhaps share a Screenshot of the discrepancy you're seeing?

Also, when you say "Mentions search included the username", are you using a custom user field and trying to search there?

Stephen Hodgson

I'm not talking about JQL search, but rather the type-ahead search when mentioning or assigning a user on a specific issue. For example, typing a comment and go to @mention somebody, but they aren't found because the cloud type-ahead search only looks at the user's display name (and they either changed their display name to a nickname or are using Kanji characters as dictated by their corporate directory).

Stephen Hodgson

Vitalii_Bobak_SaaSJet

Hi @Stephen Hodgson It’s definitely frustrating when key features like mentions and assignee searches don’t work well for distributed teams, especially given the complexity of managing varying user display names across different corporate directories.

While waiting for updates on JRACLOUD-82097, one workaround you might consider is using a tool like the Mentions Dashboard.
Add-on helps streamline tracking and responding to mentions by organizing them in a dedicated view, which could make it easier to identify and act on mentions even with inconsistent naming conventions. This way, you’ll have a clearer picture of where your input or action is needed.

Add-on newly released and developed by my team.

Hopefully, Atlassian addresses these issues soon to make Jira more intuitive for distributed and diverse teams!

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