How do I remove a user with the name 'unassigned' from my system?

eacwpku

Sometime in the past, our administrators turned "allow unassigned issues" off. Time passed, but the people clamored for unassigned issues. In their short-sightedness, new administrators, instead of turning the setting back on, created an "Unassigned" user (with the username "unassigned").

Fast-forward and the Unassigned user has 1000s of issues assigned. A benevolent administrator is trying to return to allowing properly unassigned tickets. I was able to bulk edit and change the assignment. But, the Unassigned user's "username" is the same as the special username for tickets that are properly unassigned.

I cannot remove the Unassigned user because it appears, to JIRA, to perpetually have tickets assigned to it!

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For anyone else dealing with the same:

I marked the Unassigned user "inactive" so it couldn't be assigned. I changed it's name to "nobody", which helped to see (in some searches) that it really wasn't used. I changed all projects where it was the default-assigned Project Lead to use unassigned properly.

Bruna Griebeler

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for sharing this experience with us. Indeed a user cannot be removed when it still has issues created on his username, so it's possible that there is, still something locking it.

I suggest you to check on your database for this user (nobody) and see where it is still set, specially on the tables related to issues such as jiraissue.

Here is the Jira Database Schema:

https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/Database+Schema#DatabaseSchema-IssueFields

PS: Instead of checking each table, creating a database dump and then analyzing it as text, should help on looking for this user in all tables at once.