Hi,

currently I have a big issue to face.

We have a lot of old projects and users. Some of them which already left the company or aren't involved in the project anymore. I disable them and then leave them alone until a year has passed. We aren't a big company but with 30 users in the user management it already starts to look messy. This is one of the reason why I'd want to deleted users rather than just disable them.

Now with the new European privacy regulation (DSGVO) we even have to delete all personal data of a user, too.

What I do now: I take the user, delete the profile picture and set their name to dummy values. This may be a legitimate way in privacy matters. But now I have a few disabled users with generic names. If this list keeps growing, I'm going to have a problem.

Now I just can't delete the users. I wouldn't have a problem with that, but Jira just doesn't let me, because the users have issues where they are assigned or reporters. Even though the projects are already concluded. That alone wouldn't be a problem, since I have a system user which I could bulk change all the issues to. The issue here are comments. It's not easy to get a list of all issues with comments of this user and it's even harder to delete these comments. And it's nearly impossible to change the author of a comment.

As I said, I'm obligated to remove all personal data of a user. And a lot of other companies, especially in Europe, will have to deal with this, too.

So why not just give the option to delete a user, even though he has comments and is assigned or reporter of an issue? You could just remove the user then, and assign the ticket to Unassigned or a specified/default user. And the comments: Just replace the name with a placeholder like "Deleted User" and remove the link to the profile. This way all the history is kept and it's not linked to a specific person.