Issues with Hyphens in Summaries

Question

I am experiencing issues with Jira automatically adding hyphens to my summaries. Initially, I thought this was a unique problem occurring when there are multiple summaries with similar names within our site. For example, the summary "Replace Router in DC" is repeated, and Jira first adds one hyphen, resulting in "-Replace Router in DC." Over time, it adds multiple hyphens, leading to "--------Replace Router in DC."

Despite instructing all users to create unique summaries, the hyphens continue to appear. I consulted multiple AI tools, and they suggested that the hyphens are hard-coded into Jira Cloud. However, we have another Jira site in our environment where hyphens are not added. This site is much older and significantly larger than mine.

I attempted to use automation to remove the hyphens, but this created new issues. Has anyone encountered and resolved this problem?

Thank you for your assistance.

Stephen.Lugton · Accepted Answer

@Jay Boyd there is a possibility that you've got an automation set up somewhere that updates Summary to be "-" + {{issue.summary}}

Haver a look at the automations for a project where this is occurring and see if there's an edit step in an automation that updates the summary

Stephen.Lugton · Accepted Answer

Another possibility is that you're cloning tickets and cloning is set up with "-" as a default prefix rather than "Clone - "

Tuncay Senturk _Snapbytes_ · Accepted Answer

Hi @Jay Boyd

I can say that the hyphens are not part of native Jira behavior. Jira Cloud does not automatically prepend hyphens to issue summaries.

As @Stephen_Lugton mentioned, it can be because of custom Automation rules. An automation rule may be modifying the summary field. Or a third party app may prepend those hypens, I'm not sure though.