Creating a default reporter

[Jim Stewart]

I don't know if this is possible but i thought I'd give it a shot. As you can see by the pic, we have an anonymous ethics portal. So the goal here is if someone sees an ethics infraction, they can report it here anonymously.

So in the first picture, my name comes up. To get to what's in the second picture - anonymous user - a user just types that in. 

I got to wondering if there was a way to make the default reporter for that screen Anonymous User. If not, no big deal. Just figured I'd check this out. 

[Liam Green · Accepted solution]

Hi Jim

I expect you could do it with automation - one of our projects has anonymous as the reporter, so I can do some digging into it.  EDIT: I've had a look and we removed the 'reporter field' from the issue type.

Out of interest, what shows in the ticket history for issues logged on behalf of 'anonymous user'? 

[Jack Brickey]

Liam, you mention automation here. Are you saying you use automation to change the reporter to “anonymous “? Obviously that isn’t really anonymous since the history will show original reporter and the change to anonymous. 

[Liam Green]

Hi Jack, I did think about that, and should have removed that bit.  It was my main reason for asking my question though, as our SD that uses anonymous still has me as the 'creator', so wondered what Jim's experience was

[Jack Brickey]

That is where I thought you were heading. Jim and I have had a previous discussion on this. His UC is quite interesting and useful IMO. It would be great if I could stand up an HR project where some RTs express the reporter and others are shown as anonymous. I can’t think of how to achieve that but may play with the idea a bit. The one way I considered this working is if the Customer could “report on behalf of” but this isn’t possible. 

[Jack Brickey]

The other option would be to create a public project and incorporate the Widget into an internal webpage (intranet) and the user could place predefined anonymous email into the request. 

[Jim Stewart]

So we created the anonymous user (and email) yesterday. Now, this help desk is not yet in production. But the anonymous user thing in testing worked as we wanted. We already had automation to these two HR reps depending on whether the employee was hourly or salaried. (Because different HR people handle those.) 

So to Liam's question, this is what it looks like in the queue. Which is exactly what we want. So if people enter Anonymous User, it works great. And again, if you guys tell me I have to go through a thousand hoops to have it default to that user, maybe not worth it

[Jack Brickey]

Jim, I assume “anonymous user” is reporter field and maybe “Cindy and Charlotte” the assignee?

what about the “history” of one of the issue. I would like to see how that looks. 

[Jim Stewart]

Correct on both counts. Is this the history you're looking for? 

[Jack Brickey]

no. to get to the history see below....

[Jim Stewart]

Ah. I see your point. My anonymous user doesn't really work as I expected. Well, if we can't crack this, then we can't use Jira for ethics stuff. 

[Jack Brickey]

yes, in the above it illustrates that "Jim Stewart" created the issue which certainly is not anonymous. It would be interesting to get an Atlassian answer on this because, again, I think it is a useful UC.

[Liam Green]

Sorry if my question has posed problems @Jim Stewart , but I think its best to find them before you go live

[Jim Stewart]

@Liam Green @Jack Brickey I would rather know it now for sure. But when you guys say "get an Atlassian answer, well, who am I talking to here? Should I be opening a ticket?

[Jack Brickey]

Ha...not always obvious. The Community is comprised of members, Leaders, Partners and Atlassian Team. The lozenges by the name clue you in...

Atlassian Team - an actual Atlassian employee

Community Leader - a non-Atlassian that has earned the leader badge thru contributions

Member - users like yourself that are here to ask and answer questions

Partners - are Atlassian partner companies that ofter provide apps and/or services

Liam and I are just users like yourself.

you might wish to open a support case here - Atlassian Support  any time you need support help and have exhausted the Community support or you feel there is an actual bug.

[Jim Stewart]

Ok, worth a try. Thanks for your assistance thus far. 

[Jack Brickey]

no problem Jim, glad to assist. if you get in info back please post here for future reference. Cheers!

[Jim Stewart]

Yeah, I will. I opened a new ticket. 

[Jim Stewart]

I don't  have an answer from Atlassian yet or really even a response. But then again I did not input it as a Sev1 or anything. In the meantime, I was showing this problem to a colleague. He wondered if we could turn History off just for this ethics issue. We found this which is apparently unsupported by Atlassian. It sounds like it will turn off all history for all tickets. Just thought I'd get your thoughts on it

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-hide-the-history-tab-in-the-issue-panel-702710334.html#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20hide%20the%20%22History%22%20tab%20in,the%20add-on%20Issue%20Tab%20Panels%20Plugin%20to%20expand.

[Jack Brickey]

I certainly don't have any experience but here is the thing from what I see.

1. It won't be totally anonymous as the site-admin could always go and disable it.
2. Since it isn't supported it will invariably break (murphy's law)
3. I am assuming it is global and will turn off for all projects which would be bad IMO as history is important.

[Jim Stewart]

Right. Well, this is looking increasingly non-doable. Let's see what Atlassian comes back with. Thanks. 

[Liam Green]

I'd agree with the points Jack made.  Hopefully Atlassian will come back with something useful

[Jim Stewart]

For the record, I opened a ticket 4 days ago .And other than a cheery "we've got your ticket and we're working on it," not a peep. I did NOT make it a Sev1 as we are not in production. But I continue to wait while they take their time getting around to it. 

[Jack Brickey]

For sure it isn’t a sev1. I’m sure they will get back to you soon at least that has been my experience.  

[Jim Stewart]

We are a paying customer and that is an unacceptable amount of time for a response, regardless of Sev. "Soon" isn't good enough. 

[Jack Brickey]

You can escalate the ticket if you want. Certainly, in this instance they have missed their SLA - atlassian-support-offerings 

[Jim Stewart]

@Jack Brickey  @Liam Green Well, it turns out I was wrong. They DID respond but unlike the community's responses, I did not get notified. Maybe I need to turn that on somewhere. Anyway, at your suggestion to escalate, I went back to the site and lo and behold, they give me this not-so-good answer which I will have to take as definitive. As below:

"There isn't a native way to have the reports fully anonymized, at the moment, you can have an anonymous access portal, but logged in users will be the reporters and those logged out, the system will request an email.

We had a feature request related to this option that was:

• JSDCLOUD-6173: Allow to anonymize reporter in Customer Portal

And this request was closed as duplicated from:

• JSDCLOUD-5789: Ability to rename the 'Email confirmation to' field on anonymous portal

Therefore, I suggest that you watch JSDCLOUD-5789 for future updates about this matter.

If you are not familiar with our Feature Request Policy, you can learn more about it here.

Let me know if is there anything else I can help you with."

[Jack Brickey]

Regarding not getting notified, you might scour your email (use search for the JST-xxxx number). Also check the junk box. There is not config to enable and it should come to your email.

The response is, TBH, what I fully expected. As mentioned above I am not aware of any means of doing this short of the widget and placing an 'anonymous' email into the request.

[Jim Stewart]

Yeah, I kinda expected it too. But it's my job to pursue these things diligently until I either get a definitive yes or no. Now I know for sure. Truthfully I have no idea how HR can make it truly anonymous. Not that any of this is your (or even my) problem but sending an email is traceable, making a phone call is traceable. And yet employees MUST be able to have confidentiality for fear of negative repercussions.

Oh, well, HR' problem. Thanks for your assist. I will accept answer. 

[Liam Green]

@Jim Stewart @Jack Brickey 

I think I have a potential solution to this, but I'm not sure I trust that I've managed to get it right...

If you set the 'cloned' issue to have 'Automation for Jira' as the reporter - then it will create a ticket with the following history:

The only potential issue here is if the automation fails - as then you would get the original ticket not the cloned one.

Not sure what you thoughts are on this?

[Jim Stewart]

Actually, in the interim we figured something else out, to some extent with Atlassian assistance. We now have it set up so that when someone enters the portal, they will see a link that takes them to an already existing Google doc which we've been using. When they fill out that doc, it notifies the right people in HR. They can then manually (or not as they choose) open a Jira issue to track it. This maintains anonymity without question. And yes, it adds an extra step later. But really, if we have that many ethics issues I think we have a bigger problem