How do you deal with disabled users in watcher field?

Question

Hello,

we are using a custom field as a watcher field.

I think the reason was, that we want to be able to populate the watcher field already at creation time of a new issue.

But we have a problem, that if a user looses it's permission for a project, or a user leaves the company, the watcher field still contains those entries. Then this happens, if an user wants to edit an issue with outdated watchers:

Do you have this issue too? How you deal with that issue? Is there kind of an automation to remove users of watcher lists of issues, when he losts it's permission?

And if so: how do you prevent the watch lists for thousands of issues from being deleted if only one authorization is accidentally deleted?

Thanks for your insight in your practice.

Dieter

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Dieter Guthmann

Regarding the inactive / suspended users...

The error message you show indicates which user(s) to remove, and so the person performing the edit could remove them.

For a single issue update with an automation rule, the user smart value has an attribute of "active" that is true or false (for the suspended users).  Using that, the Watcher field could be updated to remove them.

For thousands of Jira issues, that would be much more difficult, and possibly not worth the effort.  There may be marketplace apps to help with this specific scenario of users clean-up.  To do this with automation rules, it would be much more complicated and possibly require a system webhook and multiple rules.

Kind regards,
Bill

Dick · Answer

Hi @Dieter Guthmann

From 2023 onward, Jira Cloud allows setting watchers on creation of a ticket.

Information on this (and usage) is given in this Atlassian Page. I just found out that this has been taken up in the datacenter 10.3 LTS version of Jira. Good tidings!

Kind regards,

Dick