Are users created during issue import?

[Jason Graham]

I am attempting to split our current JIRA Cloud instance by moving two projects into a new instance. I realize this means exporting all of the issues for all of the projects on the source instance, importing them into the target, and then deleting the ones I do not want.

My questions involve moving the user accounts to the new instance:

1. Will user accounts be created on the target instance? Specifically, when I go to <target>.atlassian.net/admin and look at the User Management option, will the users be there? The documentation leads me to believe the answer to this is no, but I do see the user accounts in the exported XML.
2. If the answer to 1 is no, how do I create accounts in the new instance so that they will be linked to the existing users in the JIRA projects? I assume this is handled with the new Atlassian ID, so this may be a non-issue.
3. If the answer to 1 is yes, will welcome emails be sent to all users? That's something that we don't want to happen as only a subset of the users from the source instance will need to be created.

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi Jason,

from Jira-documentation:

If you are importing a username-based CSV field (e.g. Reporter or Assignee) and you do not select the Map field value checkbox for this field in the previous step of the CSV file import wizard, then the importer will automatically map imported usernames from the CSV file to (lowercase) JIRA usernames.
Regardless of whether or not you select the Map field value checkbox, JIRA will automatically create usernames based on the data in your CSV file if they have not already been defined in JIRA. 

(https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver071/importing-data-from-csv-802592885.html)

Since these users were created without email-address, there should be no email sent to them. But to be sure, you can disable the email-server before importing. 

You should also try your import before in an testing environment.

[ColinB]

Given our user license is limited we can't afford for JIRA to automatically create all the users associated with the issues, i) we don't have enough spare licenses and ii) the vast majority of these people have left the organisation. 

We can't delete the users prior to export as they've commented on thousands of issues. 

I've tried removing them from all roles and setting each one to Inactive, but as stated above it creates the Users, but not only that it sets them active again. Note, I'm doing this trialling on a test instance.

What would be your recommended approach to importing a project into our Production instance?

[MattS]

I would expect the users to be created, and I don't think that welcome emails would be sent to each user.

You could test this by unzipping the exported XML file, doing a global replace to make them all invalid, manually fix one for yourself to be valid, then import