This issue supercedes CWD-2515. I have had a chat with Olli Nevalainen and we agreed that this is a good improvement request for the behavior of JIRA when a user is deleted from the AD side or from Crowd.

Currently, the user would disappear from the JIRA user browser and will show up in gray color in the issues when he is the assignee of reporter. However, this may cause problems later on. I have witnessed one problem of it when retrieving SOAP remote issues which their assignee/reporter does not exist in JIRA due to him/her being deleted from LDAP/Crowd side. There may be more hidden problems about it.

Deleting a user who matches any of this criteria was never possible from the UI:

1. Assignee of any issue
2. Reporter of any issue
3. Lead of any project

Thus, I have raised this improvement request to keep the user in JIRA even after being deleted from the external user management system, but as an inactive user (he/she will not be able to log-in anyway).

Regards,
Ali