Why can't confluence guests access Jira issues with public permissions?

[Bridget Tracey]

I'm setting up a Confluence page with Jira filter results, but the guest users can't see the Jira issues on the page.  The Jira project is public, and I have confirmed the tickets can be viewed when a user is not logged in.  However, the guest user is getting this error:

Data cannot be retrieved due to an unexpected error.

View these issues in JIRA 

When clicking the link to the view the issues in Jira, this error is displayed:

Something's gone wrong

Try refreshing or navigating to another page. If you still see this message, our service might be disrupted.

What is the solution to allow guest confluence users to view the Jira issues?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Bridget Tracey 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

What steps exactly did you follow to make the Jira project public?

- Has anonymous access been enabled for your Jira site in addition to setting the access/permissions for the project itself to be public?

- Are you working with a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project?

If you give the customer a direct link to the Jira project are they able to view the issues?

[Bridget Tracey]

@Trudy Claspill 

I'm working in a company managed project. I have added public to the browse project permission, and I confirmed I can see an issue in the project without logging in.  Is there a different step to allow anonymous access so the guest Confluence user can see the Jira issues?

[Trudy Claspill]

Perhaps I am incorrect. I thought that it would be necessary to enable Anonymous access for the site also, but that is not mentioned in the following documentation.

As per the documentation on managing permissions for Company Managed projects:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/manage-project-permissions/

5. In the Grant permission dialog, select who to grant the permission to and click the Grant button. You can grant permissions to:

• Individual users, which your site admin can invite to your Jira products. Learn more inviting users.

• Groups, which your site admin sets up. Learn more about groups.

• Project roles, which Jira administrators can set up in advance. Learn more about project roles.

• Issue roles such as Reporter, Project Lead, and Current Assignee.

• Public, which can make issues public to the internet. Learn more about anonymous access.

• A (multi-)user picker custom field.

• A (multi-)group picker custom field. This can either be an actual group picker custom field, or a (multi-)select-list whose values are group names.

In the Learn More About Anonymous Access document

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/allow-anonymous-access-to-projects/

...it does not mention any need to enable Anonymous access for the site.

I will need to do some additional research and get back to you.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Bridget Tracey 

While trying to research this I ran across another post where the author was having trouble access Jira public issues without authenticating.

The author eventually consulted directly with Atlassian support and was told 

the “/list” in the URL was the issue. Projects can be accessed publicly via “/issues” or just on your Atlassian home page. 

I wonder if that might be related to your issues. Perhaps there is a limitation on how publicly accessible projects can be accessed, and the method used by a Jira macro in Confluence is not within scope.

I recommend that you have your Jira Administrators contact Atlassian Support directly about this. And it would be very beneficial to the community if you could report back here what you learn.

[Bridget Tracey]

@Trudy Claspill Here is the response I received from Atlassian Support:

Currently, Confluence Guest users are not able to access Jira data without being granted application access to Jira. We are tracking the following feature request regarding this.

CONFCLOUD-72912 - Allow guests to view Jira issues without access to Jira

[Trudy Claspill]

Thank you for sharing that response with us @Bridget Tracey !