How to disable avatars globally in JIRA?

[Lucas Roosevelt]

Our JIRA instance has many customers that view and audit issues and to prevent our collection of imaginative users from causing issues by using questionable avatars I need to disable Avatars or at least prevent users from uploading custom images for their avatars. Is this possible in version 5.1.x?

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi Lucas,

maybe this thread might help you: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/7199/avatar-image-pre-set

There is an idea to point all avatars to the same image, so avatars are not disabled, but everyone has the same one.

Cheers

Thomas

[Lucas Roosevelt]

Thanks for the info. While this is pretty brute force and probably not recommend you can prevent uploading custom avatars by disabling write access to $JIRA_HOME/data/avatars. It returns an internal server error when you try.

[David Willson]

I'm going to try this - https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-disable-avatar-features-in-jira-707985425.html

[Daniel Lucas]

Hello!

Did you try that? It worked? What was the image showed instead of the avatar?

Thanks and regards

[David Willson]

My end user reports he still sees them. So it didn't work. Found this today - https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-37549 - which makes me think that this feature is no longer supported.

[David Willson]

So Atlassian support sent me this;

Top right gear  > System  > General Config > Edit (right side)

Scroll down and you see "Gravitar server" and you can select off. Not sure why this isn't on this page - https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-disable-avatar-features-in-jira-707985425.html

We will test and see if that worked.

[David Willson]

This worked for us.

[Harry Chan]

You can take a look at the jira-application.properties file for the property jira.user.avatar.enabled. There should be documentation on what each property does. You can set this to false. Please give this a try.

[Lucas Roosevelt]

Thanks for the suggestion. I had found that property in the 4.2 upgrade guide and tried it but it doesn't seem to produce any noticable change in 5.1.2.

[Harry Chan]

As per the upgrade notes https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+4.4+Upgrade+Notes they now go in the jira-config.properties and the database. I couldn't find this value in the specified jpm.xml for defaults though. It might not be possible anymore.