Documentation for JIRA 4.4. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

About Public Signup and CAPTCHA

For some organisations it is appropriate to enable signup, which allows visitors to immediately create their own JIRA user accounts. If signup is not enabled, then only a JIRA administrator can create new user accounts.

For example, enabling signup can be useful if you are using JIRA as a support system and have a very large number of potential users, of which only some will need to log support tickets.

For security reasons, even if you enable signup, it is still necessary for users to have the appropriate project permissions before they can see or create issues. Note that you can use automatic group membership to add all new users to appropriate groups.

If your JIRA server is accessible from outside your organisation'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 recognise 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.

On this page:

Enabling Public Signup

  1. Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
  2. Select 'Administration' > 'System' > 'General Configuration' to open the 'General Configuration' page.
    (tick) Keyboard shortcut: 'g' + 'g' + start typing 'general configuration'
  3. Click 'Edit Configuration' at the end of the page.
  4. In the 'Mode' drop-down, select 'Public'.
  5. Click the 'Update' button at the bottom of the screen.
  6. 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 CAPTCHA

  1. Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
  2. Select 'Administration' > 'System' > 'General Configuration' to open the 'General Configuration' page.
    (tick) Keyboard shortcut: 'g' + 'g' + start typing 'general configuration'
  3. Click 'Edit Configuration' at the end of the page.
  4. Locate 'CAPTCHA on signup' and select 'On'.
  5. Click the 'Update' button at the bottom of the screen.
  6. 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:



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