Enabling public signup and CAPTCHA
If your JIRA application server is accessible from outside your organization's firewall, and you have enabled signup, then you may want to also enable CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA helps ensure that only real humans (and not automated spam systems) can sign themselves up to JIRA. When CAPTCHA is enabled, visitors will need to recognize a distorted picture of a word (see example below), and must type the word into a text field. This is easy for humans to do, but very difficult for computers.
Enabling public signup for JIRA Core and JIRA Software
- Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
- Choose
> System. Select General Configuration to open the Administration page. - Click 'Edit Configuration' at the end of the page.
- In the 'Mode' drop-down, select 'Public'.
- Click the 'Update' button at the bottom of the screen.
- Log out of JIRA, then click the 'Log In' link at the top right of the screen and verify that the 'Sign Up' link is displayed at the bottom of the login screen.
Enabling public signup for JIRA Service Desk
With public signup enabled, agents can invite new customers to a service desk project, and new customers can create accounts on the Customer Portal and through email. Enabling public signup for your service desk project also enables a honeypot technique which helps prevent spambots from creating accounts through the customer portal.
You must first enable public signup at the system level:
- Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
- Choose
> Applications. Scroll down to the JIRA Service Desk section and choose Configuration. - In the Public signup section, enable the setting.
You or a service desk project administrator can then open a service desk at the project level:
- Go to Project administration > Customer permissions.
- Select Anyone can sign up for a customer account on my Customer Portal.
New customers will be added to the Service Desk Customers project role. Note that customer accounts created via public signup don't count towards a service desk license.
In situations where users are unable to change their passwords, check that a Delegated Authentication Directory is not the highest in the order of User Directories. As a workaround, you can change the order of User Directories, or alternatively use a connection to a LDAP directory instead.
Enabling CAPTCHA for JIRA application login screens
CAPTCHA can be enabled so that anyone attempting to sign up to your JIRA instance through the JIRA login screen will be presented with a random sequence of letters, that they must type to confirm they're a real person. This is to try prevent spamming, and malicious attacks.
- Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
- Choose > System. Select General Configuration to open the Administration page.
- Click 'Edit Configuration' at the end of the page.
- Locate 'CAPTCHA on signup' and select 'On'.
- Click the 'Update' button at the bottom of the screen.
- Log out of JIRA, click the 'Log In' link at the top right of the screen, then click the 'Sign Up' link and verify that a random sequence of letters is displayed at the bottom of the 'Sign Up' screen — e.g. "winzers" in the following screenshot:
