How to prevent bulk user creation when importing project from XML?

[Pavel Boev]

Hello,

I am about to migrate projects from one instance to another using XML backup + project import.

The original instance was for open source projects and there were tons of community users who commented on, watched, voted for and changed issues.

In the receiving instance I do not care much about interactions from community users. It is perfectly OK for me if the history shows that user01 (some dummy user) made the change.

I care about the mandatory users - reporters, assignees, component leads and project leads and I will ensure that there are matching users for them in the receiving instance.

However when I tried to import the project on a test instance, Jira created 10 mandatory users (that I care about) and 170 optional users (commenters, watchers,...) that I don't care about.

Is there a way to prevent jira from creating the optional users during project import?

I thought about enabling "External User Management" just for the time of the import and then disabling it again.

Will that work?

How will history entries / comments appear in the UI, if Jira was not able to create the optional users?

Thanks in advance,

Pavel