Why can't I delete a comment on an issue in JIRA?

[Doug Miller]

I have read the documentation at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Commenting+on+an+Issue which seems to be pretty straigh forward regarding editing/deleting a comment. There are supposed to be little icons in the upper right hand corner when you hover over the comment (this is depicted in the 'Editing a comment' area with a screenshot).

I do no have these icons. I have searched all over the internet and I cannot figure this out.

First, I thought that I may not have "Delete own comments" or the "Delete all comments" permissions on the project. So I checked these values. I do have them set.

Next, I thought there may be some group to permission issue. So I used the 'Permission helper' and looked up my user, with a specific issue that had a comment on it, and I got a green check box with a messsage 'You have the "Delete Own Comments" permission!" but the icons still do not appear.

I am at a loss now. We have JIRA 6.0.1 installed and did upgrade from a 5.2 install.

Is there something else I can check or something I am missing?

Thanks for your help!

[Raju KC · Accepted solution]

Reindex it.

[Doug Miller]

I was able to solve my problem. I did Re-Index and that did not solve my issue. However, this lead me to research it further.

I looked at more recent issues and I was able to see the edit/delete icons. This was both before, and after the re-index. The only difference I could find is that we had issues marked 'open', 'resolved', and 'closed'. None of the 'closed' issues could be edited/deleted.

It seems that you can add comments to a closed issue but you cannot edit/delete those comments. I reopened the issue and I could then edit/delete the comments. This seems like a bug to me because I do not think that you should be able to comment on a closed issue.

EDIT: Marking the 'reindex it' answer as correct as it lead me to the solution. However, that in and of itself did not solve the issue. Thanks for the input.

[Natalie Hobson]

Sounds like you have the jira.issue.editable flag in your Closed step; this means you wouldn't be able to edit issues in a Closed status - see more info here. :)

[Doug Miller]

You are exactly right. Now that I know it was due to a closed issue I can find it on google searches. I still do not understand what the reasoning behind being able to comment on a closed issue is. Any ideas on this? Having to make a new workflow or reopening just to edit/delete a comment seems odd.

[Natalie Hobson]

I understand why some people would want Closed issues not be edited (I remove that flag from my workflows, I can't stand it myself), but as for commenting on a Closed issue I suppose that you might need to add info to an issue after it's closed, for communication's sake.