Symptom

In Jira, when moving issues from one project to another one, comments that are restricted (to a project role) on that issue disappear. This affects moving single issues as well as bulk moving issues.

Cause

The target project does not have any members in the project role that the issue comment is restricted to. The comment is not actually deleted, rather, there are no users with permission to view it in the target project.

For example,

• You have a project role named "staff" (note, project roles exist across all projects).
• You are moving an issue from Project A to Project B. The issue has a comment that is restricted to "staff".
• Project B does not have any users assigned to the project role "staff".
• Once the issue has been moved to Project B, the restricted issue comment will appear to be gone.

Workaround

You can address this in a number of ways, depending on how you want to handle permissions for the comment:

• Remove restrictions from the issue comment before moving the issue.
• Add users to the project role in the target project before moving the issue.

Note

This KB article is only about the "Moving issue" feature, and not about the "Cloning issue" one. When using the clone function, it is expected that none of the comments from the original issue will be copied over to the cloned issue, as it is a Jira feature limitation which is tracked in the feature requests:

• Jira Server / Data Center:
  • JRASERVER-70683 - Getting issue details... STATUS
  • JRASERVER-5052 - Getting issue details... STATUS
• Jira Cloud:
  • JRACLOUD-5052 - Getting issue details... STATUS