How do I let anonymous users create issues ONLY via the Issue Collector?

Question

Currently, I have an issue collector working - however visitors to the root URL of the JIRA instance see a "Create" button, are able to see the project name, and can create as many issues as they like.

How can I make it so anonymous users can only create issues via the Issue Collector?

Thank you!

Andy Heinzer · Answer

It is possible to do with just the basic JIRA, provided that you don't need to know exactly which person created the issue.  JIRA needs to set a value for the reporter when creating issues.  The issue collector will allow you to set some specific account to be the reporter of the issue.  You could just use this method to have all the issues created via an issue collector.  In JIRA all of these would just say created by the same single user.   As long as the reporter you choose in the issue collect does have the "Create Issue" permission for that project, then the issue collector should be able to fit this need.

But it sounds like you might be doing this in order to avoid having to licensing all these users in JIRA.  If that is the case, then I would suggest taking a look at JIRA Service Desk.  This add-on for JIRA will allow you create a customer portal for the end users to create their own issues.  So each customer would have their own login.  Also the other big plus is that customer accounts do not consume a license seat, so you can have as many customers as you want.   These customers do not have access to the main JIRA site though, they only have access to the customer portal page for that project, and in turn they can only see issues they reported or where they have been made a requested participant to.

mhatma · Answer

Thank you for your reply. I think this all makes sense - Ideally I want each client and their staff to be able to report issues via one page without them having to log in to JIRA. Am I right in thinking this isn't possible? I note you can have issues reported "from" a user but I believe I tried this and it didn't work correctly.

Andy Heinzer · Answer

If anonymous users can create issues on the main JIRA site, then you would need to modify the permission schemes in your JIRA instance in order to change the "Create Issue" permission to no longer include the "Anyone" value.   Managing project permissions - Atlassian Documentation has the steps on exactly how to do this.  But if you do this, then you also need to make sure that your other authenticated users still have permissions to create issues, otherwise you could be preventing everyone from creating issues.   If you're using JIRA 7 there is an option for "Any Logged-in User" which might be helpful if you want to keep it relatively open, but still exclude these anonymous users.

If you have even one project in that JIRA instance that allows that "Anyone" to create issues, then that create button will still be visible to anonymous users.