Why does JIRA add a random selection of users to new projects?

[Tom Cowles]

When setting up a new project, JIRA adds the same random selection of users to the project by default. Almost all of these people have nothing to do with the project, and almost all aren't even employed by our company. I can't find anywhere on the site where these users appear as a group, or as a default group.

Anybody know why this is, and how I can stop it from happening?

Thanks in advance

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Have a look in Admin -> Roles and check who is set up in the "default" for each

[Tom Cowles]

But this happens without me assigning any roles to a project... the only roles I ever need to assign are developers, and administrators, both of which only contain relevant people. However, Jira is assigning people before I've had a chance to

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Roles are global containers, they exist across all projects automatically, you don't add them to projects at all.  If a project exists, it has all the roles on the list.

[Tom Cowles]

So how would I go about choosing which roles appear by default? Obviously I don't want group "Clients at company X" appearing for a project for "company Y" without my having configured it so

[Joe Pitt]

You can't. As @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- said, the roles are global, which means they exist in ALL projects. I would go to the role definitions and remove the default users/groups. I rarely setup any defaults for the reason you're experiencing. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You don't.  All roles exist in a project automatically.

I'd remove the users from the default roles myself.  I try to keep the defaults to a minimum safe set, which generally means "internal users", never customers or clients, for fear of adding them to the wrong projects by accident.

[Tom Cowles]

The issue is the groups being given default access to new projects don't appear to have any access... at least can't see any setting that says they do.

The groups in question don't say anywhere that they have permissions for anything whatsoever. There's even users being pulled in by default that belong to groups that don't seem to exist!