We get attacks on a regular base. I can recommend to enabled Captchas. Feature would be handy though.

I have a bit of a better view of this missing feature now. First of all, a straight-up DELETE of users is a risky operation b/c that results in actual removed tuples and potential relational DB problems. So maybe allowing for that in the GUI admin console in bulk is not a great idea, and there is some wisdom requiring this operation to be performed by an admin that can understand/handle the SQL operation.

However, what should exist, is a bulk DEACTIVATE option, which is what I really needed when I first came across this request. And in that case, I get all conspiracy theory about it, because Jira licenses are priced based active user count, so a bulk deactivate is a feature that reduces revenue. That seems obvious enough that I probably shouldn't call it a conspiracy. How often do any of us build things with revenue-reducing potential?

@arne2: Refer to JSDSERVER-5706 for more tips and tricks to remove the unwanted users.

We have been attacked by what appears to be russians. They have created more than 400 unique accounts in our service desk. We need a way of deleting these accounts safely.

There is a new plugin that allows bulk user delete. It's called "Bulk User Delete for Jira" and it available on Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.empyra.bud.BulkUserDeleteforJira/server/overview

Because "You can now bulk delete users" doesn't look great on a list of new features.

Here's a script I made to bulk delete users through the REST API and curl. Any users who are a reporter, assignee, or shared filters/dashboards will not be deleted (limitation of Jira, you have to remove those first). Give it a filename list a list of users, one username per line.

#!/bin/bash

# CONFIG
# Give these values to skip prompts

adminuser=
jira=

# END CONFIG

if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
	echo "Usage: $0 infile"
	exit 1
fi

infile=$1
if [ ! -r $infile ]; then
	echo "Can't read file: $infile"
	exit 1
fi

if [ -z $jira ]; then
	echo -n "Jira Base URL:"
	read jira
fi

if [ -z $adminuser ]; then
	echo -n "Username:"
	read adminuser
fi

echo -n "Password:"
read -s adminpass
echo

cmd=DELETE
api=/rest/api/2/user

while read u; do
	echo -n "$u: "
	curl --insecure --silent --show-error -u $adminuser:$adminpass -X $cmd -H "Content-Type: application/json" "$jira$api?username=$u"
	echo
done < $infile

How is it that this is still not a feature!?!?

I need to delete over 1000 users from our Jira instance. Not to go all conspiracy theorist...but that action would take our annual Jira license bill from 48k to 12k, and that seems to be a reason to park a feature like this for 12-and-a-half years.

I have to totally agree with Haddon. I would go with "it's 2005, do your homework"

I know that front-end development is awesome and so cool because there you get recognized. But what is a shiny front-end with shitty administrative features. Guys that was basic stuff back in 2005 and it is still not implemented.

In my opinion the role as an administrator got way harder with the new UI, because you can't find anything anymore, therefore when I found something I want to get things done very quickly not loose twice as much time.

I echo what Haddon says. We have so many users who need to be purged. Why is there not a do action field that removes a list of users who just take up a lic and have never logged in or left. 

Well said Haddon, I could not agree more.

I've been administering JIRA for almost 10 years now, and despite the hundreds of little frustrations I run into on a daily basis, I really try hard not to jump on JAC and get feisty - I get that there's a million different priorities pulling at these products, and you can only fit so many hours in the day.

However, I have to admit it gets really hard to give you the benefit of the doubt when I see that basic administrative features like this don't exist. I understand that developing sexy front-end things bring users through your door, but ultimately the people who make sure those users have a good experience (and thus continue to pay the bills) are the administrators, who generally have more important things to do than hand-remove users from groups.

I shouldn't need to do a rain dance, or work through API's, or futz with SQL to manage user groups. I should be able to see a list, check some boxes, and hit a button. I am going to say "it's 2017, get your act together" but honestly 2012 or 2008 would work just as well.

Atlassian doesn't seem to need big customers:

• No bulk deletion to users
• Setting up normal DEV, QA and production environments requires a rocket scientist to do it and one month duration (this is only a guestimate as I didn't succeed with it)
• Single letter, company internal, domain names are banned

Situation is bad enough that I should write to the head of their R&D. Oh wait, I did that already, but you can see the result as even trivial issues (1 & 3) are still here. Well, never mind then. What other alternatives were there again besides JIRA?

This is real pain when you want to assign project roles or groups or do any other action with multiple users. You have to be clicking monkey. There are bulk options almost everywhere, but not for users. Shame.

+1000

With the new announcement that pricing will change (most likely will go up) depending on how many users you have in the cloud system, I strongly believe that this feature is needed more than ever. 

https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/cloud/future-pricing 

It opens up the possibility for those who don't have a real easy way to manage hundreds/thousands of users, to be charged extra for not having this simple feature accessible. Unless the true outcome of not having this feature is starting to play itself out with the new announcement, and you want to openly overcharge your customers. I hope not, as that would be a very immoral practice, and one that the BBB would be extremely interested in.

11+ years on, appreciate if this can be considered. Thanks

Status check on this ticket? I have need to delete hundreds of users. 

Hi, considering that the license depends on the number of active JIRA users, I'm expecting a far better user management tool. Particularly a function to identify inactive users with a certain criteria and that to delete them at one click are absolutely essential. It is really an unnecessary manual effort that I have to check and delete users with one by one. As we are handling some hundreds to 2.000 users in JIRA, I want to have these functions asap. 

Thanks.

In an environment like mine where we have not been using Jira for over 10 years and have gone through many changes in ldap configuration and even company names... it would be very helpful to be able to do this.

I find it extremely concerning that this feature isn't available. For those of us who once linked their install up to a LDAP environment, and the thousands of user accounts that were created in doing so (enterprise environment) - not being able to delete them once we chose to go into a different direction is unacceptable. Now either I have to spend time deleting them one by one, just so they don't show/clutter up the Confluence install.

Wow, this has been opened since 2005 and still no solution???

I found a link to this hoping that there is a solution by now.

I don't know why I bother voting for these things. This issue is 10 years old and no doubt you will say it's been dealt with by a new product (Crowd) that would mean forking out for another license fee. Just close the ticket as "won't fix" because it's pretty clear by now that you're not going to. (And yes, I read the post on Atlassian Answers. As they say in Tennessee "you talk pretty, but I'd rather see it fixed.")

For testing purposes this would be a handy feature. We want to test if mails are sent correctly when certain actions are done in the workflow but we don't want all the other users getting email notifications from filters. So it would be nice to either delete all filters, or almost all users.

I am writing a user importer and would really love a bulk delete option to use between tests.

Current solution is a work around and leaves all the user meta data lying around, but works in a test environment.

delete from userbase where username != 'admin'

It would be a very good feature.
eg. when i want to create a test-enviroment from an existing customer enviroment and fill it with my testing data (test-users etc.)

We've just had around 200 users move to another JIRA installation. I really don't want to manually delete all 200 from the original JIRA installation.

when uploading previous issues from another software package the reporters were duplicated. I would like to be able to mass/bulk delete those 37 users.

And, bulk rename users, to correct for example an email domain. This is very tedious to accomplish in JIRA. Further, it seems very ODD to me that the userid in text seems to appear all over the database in different fields, instead of an ordinal ID linking back to a master users table. This effectively renders mass renames very hard.

it will better to have the option bulk delete users.For example. with a project with customers when it over i want to delete the houndread user i have for that project.

More appropriate summary

No, it's not currently possible to bulk-delete users. I'll leave this open as a feature request.