How do I remove a user with the name 'unassigned' from my system?

[Anthony Mastrean]

Sometime in the past, our administrators turned "allow unassigned issues" off. Time passed, but the people clamored for unassigned issues. In their short-sightedness, new administrators, instead of turning the setting back on, created an "Unassigned" user (with the username "unassigned").

Fast-forward and the Unassigned user has 1000s of issues assigned. A benevolent administrator is trying to return to allowing properly unassigned tickets. I was able to bulk edit and change the assignment. But, the Unassigned user's "username" is the same as the special username for tickets that are properly unassigned.

I cannot remove the Unassigned user because it appears, to JIRA, to perpetually have tickets assigned to it!

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For anyone else dealing with the same:

I marked the Unassigned user "inactive" so it couldn't be assigned. I changed it's name to "nobody", which helped to see (in some searches) that it really wasn't used. I changed all projects where it was the default-assigned Project Lead to use unassigned properly.

[Benito Picarelli]

Hello Anthony,

After running this bulk change, did you have the chance to run a full locked re-index?

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Re-Indexing+after+Major+Configuration+Changes

Please run this and let us know if the indexing of the issues bulk-changed appears correct.

[Anthony Mastrean]

Thanks for the tip, Benito. I'm on an old JIRA and have to trigger the reindex manually, cross my fingers, and hope it comes back overnight :)

[Bruna Griebeler]

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for sharing this experience with us. Indeed a user cannot be removed when it still has issues created on his username, so it's possible that there is, still something locking it.

I suggest you to check on your database for this user (nobody) and see where it is still set, specially on the tables related to issues such as jiraissue.

Here is the Jira Database Schema:

https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/Database+Schema#DatabaseSchema-IssueFields

PS: Instead of checking each table, creating a database dump and then analyzing it as text, should help on looking for this user in all tables at once.

[Anthony Mastrean]

I'm certain that the user has no more tickets assigned. I bulk changed 1000s of tickets today. The fake-unassigned user's profile still shows all of these tickets! I just assigned a new ticket to the built-in unassigned and this fake-unassigned user's ticket count increased!

The problem seems to be in the username (field) or the assignee (search field). It's literally "unassigned" for both my user and the built-in user that JIRA uses for unassigned tickets.