Good idea. We have the same problem on support.atlassian.com,
occasionally wanting to bring someone other than the reporter in on a
discussion.

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Indeed you could, and it what we have done on our support site. Simply add the multi-user custom field to the Project/Issue Type, and then add the field to the Security Level. Then if you add a user to the field, they will have the permission of the Security Level.

Let us know if you have any troubles with this.

Cheers,
Nick

But then, I wanted to have those persons who are in the partisipants list to also appear in the list of 'assignable users'. I added the custom field to the assignable users permission, and now the dropdown assignee list disappears there is a entry in the participants list of the issue.

Am I abusing/overextending a feature or is this a bug? How do I make the users in the multi-user custom field as assignable resources?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

coming here via JRA-13247. The custom field solution should work for us as well. Two additional advantages of the custom field in comparison to the system standard come to mind:

• watcher change history (useful to reconstruct who got email notifications on certain changes)
• ability to set watchers during issue creation

We are using JIRA in a helpdesk situation. Key users on the customer side have the right manage watchers (talking about the standard feature now), but not to edit an issue because this would give them access to fields that are only to be set by the support team. I figured out that I after creating a custom field like you proposed, I can retain this capability by creating additonal transitions "Manage watchers" that don't change the issue status but show the "Watcher" custom field on the transition screen.

I've removed all permissions to view / manage Watchers (system feature) for everybody, as the system feature isn't to be used any more.

Two issues remain:

• Data migration: existing watcher entries have to be migrated into the custom field, as keeping two sets of watchers in a project would create confusion without end. I've been thinking of a database script during a system downtime to deal with that. Can you make a script available (JIRA 3.11 on SQL-Server) or do you possibly have a better idea ?

• Template customization: In the issue view, the issue details still show the watchers (system feature). Number of watchers shows up as 0, although n watchers are entered into the custom field. I'd like to remove this display altogether or synchronize it with the custom field (only if that is easier). Also, and more importantly, in the issue operations the "Watch it" operation has to be disabled / removed or changed to work on the new custom field. Otherwise users try to watch an issue using this link, but end up filling a field with their user-id that is not relevant any more. Can you give advice on which template files to modify?

Thanks & kind regards
Axel

I stumbled across JRA-13523 in the release notes for 3.12, I think it relates to your question (depending on which version you are using, upgrading might fix your problem).

Kind regards
Axel

thanks for that heads up - that will solve it for us. Well spotted. Now I just have to plan in another upgrade around all my other mods.

Kind regards

Christian