Allowing anonymous users?

[Nathan Battles]

As a JIRA admin, do you allow anonymous users in your JIRA instance?

Why, why not?

What factors led you to the decision you chose? What size organization do you support?

TIA

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

Quite a lot of the JIRA systems I help with have anonymous access.

The decision is mostly down to "let's make some stuff easy to share with a wider audience".  When it's not down to being more open and sharing, it's to help with performance (granting anonymous access to an issue bypasses all the work in working out if the current user can see it, so it can speed stuff up a lot in some cases).

For sizing, the smallest I help with is 3 users, the largest has tens of thousands.

A couple of points though

• Despite anonymous access being popular, you need to think carefully about the audience.  If the system is inside your organisation's firewall, then it's usually ok, as you trust your employees (hopefully!).  If it's not, or you have HR or finance using JIRA for xample, then a lot of the systems are only partial - they'll have anonymous access enabled on a project by project basis, being careful to only allow it on projects they want the clients to see
• Stick to "browse" (and maybe "view workflow").  You do NOT want anonymous users making any changes, as you'll never know who did it.  (As for public systems, well, you can't have egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam...)

[Nathan Battles]

Thanks Nic. I think establishing the anonymous access on a project by project basis is good - at the discretion of the project owner.