Comments visibility/mail-in

Question

We are creating an HR project and would like to be able to create some comments that the reporter of the issue cannot see.  For instance, the reporter sends mails in and an issue is created. The HR person assigned to the issue then seeks manager approval for the issue and they need to communicate about it without the reporter seeing it (can comments be hidden in this way from the reporter?). Then further comments are created that we WANT the reporter to see (your issue has been approved, etc.).  Any ideas?  Thanks!

Hangsu Ma · Answer

If you are using JIRA mail/email handlers to create comments from mails between HR and managers, you can use this plugin to setup two email handlers with comment visibility:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/biz.beag.jira.mailer

In your first handler, you will set the comment visibility to HR only, then processing an email box called "review@mycompany.com".

In your second handler, you will set the comment visibility to public, and processing email for "approval@mycompany.com".

During HR review, they will send email to "review@mycompay.com" with JIRA reference in the title, which in turn will become an private comment. Once it's approved, they can send an approval email to "apporavl@mycompany.com" which will become a visible comment for the requester.

unknown · Answer

How JIRA would do this is through comment visibility, however, managers would be required to pick an appropriate comment visibility level ( http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Commenting+on+an+Issue ).  Naturally, this expectation may be a little difficult to impose, and in a HR environment, 'informtation leakage' to the issue creator due to a careless comment addition that did not have an appropriate issue security set would be possible.

First improvement to this situation is to write a Post Function to automatically set issue comment security before notifications are triggered, I did something like this before (https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/wiki/display/JJPFL/Javahollic+Jira+Post+Function+Library ) but havent had time to update it recently.

You could approach this with a similar post function to set the issue secure 'tightly' for all comments, but once the issue has progressed to a particular stage in the issue workflow, that this restriction is lifted, which would achieve your goals.  This functionality doest exist out of the box and isn't AFAIK implemetned, you'd need to get it developed.