I've been messing around with Jira permissions for several days. What I've learnt may help allay some confusion to avoid banging more heads against walls.
All I really needed was the view-only access available to anonymous users but secured behind a login. This is not possible. Anonymous means unidentifiable user. As soon as your user is identifiable, you require another license. This was hard for me to grasp and applies to both the Service desk and Jira when exposing issues. My brain simply wouldn't allow anonymous access to trump customer access.
Portal customers can create requests but can't view issues. Anonymous users can view issues but can't create requests. This makes sense when you know it but when you're trying to make either alternative work without realising they won't work, it's mind bending.
Portal customers cannot be configured to view or browse issues outside of their portal. Even a direct link to an issue they created will redirect them to the portal.
The service desk provides the simple portal view for unlicensed customers but that's it. No amount of permission manipulation will alter this. As soon as a portal customer logs in, they lose the anonymous view of issues they just had. They could use incognito mode or a different browser to see both views but that's not a viable workaround.
The only way to grant portal customers a view of issues they didn't create is to add them to an organisation specified in the issue or to add them individually as participants. Unfortunately, you can't use groups as participants or add groups to organisations and their view is a the simplified portal view.
Issue level security can restrict anonymous access for particular issues but this cannot be integrated with portal customers who can't view any issues outside their portal.
I had a lot of trouble with these concepts but it's all based around licensing.
If I'm mistaken on anything, please let me know so we can all learn. The suite is amazing and we'll make it work for our team but the service desk and customer interaction are sadly lacking for our purposes. You won't find public collaboration and voting on feature requests and bugs using server licenses for small teams.
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