Why can unlicensed users be assigned to project roles?

[John W]

Since Jira Software users can't do anything without a license (unlike JSD where there are portal users), it's counterintuitive and confusing that the 'Add users to a role' button in a project's Users and Roles page lets you add an unlicensed user to a role.  Project admins add a user, not knowing they're unlicensed, and then don't understand why that user can't do anything.

Is there a particular reason, for Jira Software, it's set up that way?  Am I missing something?

[Apryl Harris]

Community - is this article still relevant? As a Jira Admin for our company, I didn't think Project Admins could add unlicensed users to a project anymore. I thought the user piker would NOT find the name.

Please advise.

[Prince Nyeche]

Hi @John W 

The application access feature is meant to allow administrators to control which users have access to Jira applications, regardless of whether that user is currently active. This is explained here on what is to be done for your users. Therefore the expected behaviour here is to deactivate the user instead of removing the application access that way Project Admins don't face this issue.

[John W]

That doesn't work at all when you're using Atlassian Access and have users that only use one or two apps.  I haven't found a way with Access to specify which apps apply to each user, so there are a lot of users showing up in Jira's 'Add users to role' picker that don't even use Jira.

[Prince Nyeche]

I guess it wouldn't since that the situation.

[John W]

There's still the question of why the Jira Software 'Add users to role' picker shows users without licenses when those users can't do anything.  Any idea there, @Prince Nyeche?

[Prince Nyeche]

I think, that has been a long standing issue with how Jira works because all users when not using an Application should be deactivated but your use case shows otherwise because you have multiple Applications, so deactivation should be done per Application that way it can work as expected.

However this won't happen because Jira would simply pull out users because they simply exist as a user without an application access. So in my opinion, I don't think Atlassian would be touching this aspect anytime soon, because it also draws other problems such as an Admin you can easily manage users by preserving their details on filters or dashboard without actually breaking anything when application access is not provided. So if that feature is removed, when the user without Application access becomes unsearchable or when deactivated they are unsearchable, it will definitely break other parts of Jira, which I think will cause a Big problem.

[Arthur Mack]

Makes no sense to me either.