If you have special reason to reserve the used key or name, please give correct error alert to indicate such information.  Please do not mislead..

This is an infuriating simple, highly voted and yet seemingly untouched feature.

Bumping, any updates on this?

+1 for getting this updated. Hard to justify why we cant reuse a KEY name 

This is an important issue since our customer hope to use a specific key, with Atlassian can resolve this issue asap, thanks.

b110fa26e2e4 You may well want the redirect to be broken, e.g. if the original key or name contained an accidental/obscured profanity. Now you can neither opt out of the redirect from the old name nor even check if there is such a redirect at all without connecting to the database.

Yes I quite get some requests like "Please rename Project (key) XXX to XXXOLD and recreate Project as XXX".

This luckily never works and should not work for a matter of consistency. 

Instead the we have create project XXX2.

This way any external reference to the original name  (e.g. in Req. docu in confluence, and incident reporting ) would still work.

Thus a reference to http://jira.example.com/browse/XXX-123 would be forwarded to  http://jira.example.com/browse/XXXOLD-123 and still point to the original issue.

People who request this put esthetics and emotions over consistency. 

For a matter of clarity and consistency new projects should have new names.

I just migrated a project from Jira software to Jira Server by creating new project and wanted to switch project keys so users could keep working the way they are used to. I can try to delete old project and see what it does...

Like so many others, I'm frustrated that old, deleted project names are forever off limits. That creates an ever-growing list of names that cannot be used forcing the fabrication of less desirable variants.

The search issue described by Daniel Bubla makes this problem one not just of frustration, but confusion and incorrect information.

We also ran into this issue (or pretty similar issue) in our company recently. An old project had its project key changed and a new project with the same name (as the previous key name), but a different key was created. This now causes issues with searches and generating reports.

Project 1:

• Old Key: ADAM
• New Key: SPF

Project 2:

• Project name: ADAM
• Project key: SEADAM

Observed behavior:

When using the advanced search in Jira like "project = ADAM" and selecting the autocomplete shown for project with key "SEADAM", the search will not update the JQL to "project = SEADAM", but will use "project = ADAM" instead. The search results will show the issues from Project 1 and not as expected from Project 2.

This causes confusion with our users as they will experience different search results and reports depending on how and from where they generate reports.

Workaround in our case:

We renamed the project from "ADAM" to another project name and this resolves our issue with the autocomplete leading to unexpected results. While searching for "project = ADAM" still gives issues of the wrong project at least the search is no longer misleading.