Moderating user group activity with Safeguards in Jira Service Management
Configure comment limits
While Safeguards are enabled and configured with a comment limit by default, you may want to change the default values or define the user groups whose activity you want to be moderated automatically.
Restricting group activity may limit a group members' ability to perform actions that are explicitly or implicitly related to commenting:
- bulk editing issues
- importing instance backups
- creating sample projects with prefilled data
- commenting on issue transitions
You can determine which comment authors are the most active by running the following query on your database. This may be helpful in identifying bot accounts.
SELECT
author,
count(*) as "number of comments"
FROM
jiraaction
WHERE
actiontype='comment'
GROUP BY
author
ORDER BY
count(*)
DESC
LIMIT 50;You may also find it helpful to learn how to find the issues with the most issue link or comments.
To complete the configuration:
- Select Administration > System.
- On the General Configuration page, select Advanced Settings.
Optionally, change the default value of 1000 for the jira.safeguards.issue.comments property to a different maximum number of comments per issue. The value of no limit ("-1") disables alerting and limiting functionality.
Set the value of the jira.safeguards.config.restricted.groups property to a comma-separated list of groups that the limit should be applied to.
We recommend setting this value to the group containing accounts used for automation and artificial content generation (bot accounts). The default value of no group ("") implies that no group is being limited.
Setting this property is not required if you're only interested in the notification feature.
Select Update to save your changes.
Receive email notifications
As long as a limit is set, Safeguards will send email notifications to all System Administrators when:
- 90% of the configured limit is reached
- 100% of the configured limit is reached
- an attempt at breaching the limit is made
- the set limit is exceeded by 10% for the first time
- the number of comments in an issue increases by another 10% above the set limit (at 120%, 130%, and so on)
To receive email notifications, set a global comment limit.
Collect audit log events
Safeguardsl can save information about blocking an account’s activity to the audit log.
To collect audit log events from the tool, set a global comment limit and a restricted group, and make sure that the end user activity audit coverage level is set to Full. Learn how to edit audit log settings
Detailed log information is also saved to the atlassian-jira.log file. Log events related to approaching or exceeding the limit are created at the WARN level. Alert events aren’t collected in the audit log if no user activity was blocked.
Disable Safeguards
To disable the feature entirely:
- Go to
<JIRA_URL>/secure/admin/SiteDarkFeatures!default.jspa, where<JIRA_URL>is the base URL of your Jira instance. - In the Enable dark feature text area, enter
com.atlassian.jira.safeguards.disabled, and then select Add.
To re-enable the Safeguards, in the Site Wide Dark Features panel, find com.atlassian.jira.safeguards.disabled, and then select Disable.
Disable email notifications
To disable email notifications:
- Go to
<JIRA_URL>/secure/admin/SiteDarkFeatures!default.jspa, where<JIRA_URL>is the base URL of your Jira instance. - In the Enable dark feature text area, enter
com.atlassian.jira.safeguards.email.notifications.disabled, and then select Add.
To re-enable email notifications, in the Site Wide Dark Features panel, find com.atlassian.jira.safeguards.email.notifications.disabled, and then select Disable.
Disabling email notifications has no effect on collecting log data in the atlassian-jira.log file and the audit log.