Disable drop down list to select assignee and add watchers

[Mike McInnis]

In a Jira data center instance with lots of projects with lots of internal users, we have a few Jira projects that are accessible to all internal users and a few external users (outside our company with special permissions).

We want to enable our external users to reassign issues and add watchers, but not see all the possible users in the drop down list.

Is there a way to disable the drop down pick list, for assignee and watchers, but still allow any user to be entered in the fields?

We want the external users to see the actual assignee and watcher names on issues.

[Mike McInnis · Accepted solution]

Our best option for the data center seems to be to relax how stringent we are with sharing names, ensure we are not including email addresses in the drop down list, and obfuscate any other information in user names that should not be shared.

[Shawn Masters]

See "User Filtering" in the article linked below:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/configuring-a-custom-field-938847235.html

[Mike McInnis]

Thanks for the response.  I'm not sure how user filtering applies to my problem.  As I understand it, I would need to make Assignee a custom field (currently a system field) -- not certain how that changes its behavior.

Then wouldn't user filtering restrict the users available for selection?  I don't want to restrict who can be an Assignee, I just want to avoid a pick list.

[Shawn Masters]

Ah I see, from what I understand that is a core function of the field itself. In the cloud we are not able to modify this but the OnPrem should be capable..unfortunately I only have experience with the cloud version. 

An example of how you can edit the OnPrem fields:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-fully-render-assignee-drop-down-list-in-jira-284366214.html?_ga=2.155424443.125327614.1582137372-1021275049.1580761189