Skip to content
Help Center
Browse documentation

Assign issues and discuss them in comments

Hand an issue to a teammate, get them notified, and keep the conversation on the issue with comments. Includes what does and does not work with @mentions.

Updated 3 min read
In this article

Assign an issue so it has an owner, then use comments to share context with your team.

Before you start

  • You need a teammate in your organization. See Invite teammates.
  • Developers, QA Engineers, QA Leads, Admins and Owners can assign and comment. Viewers cannot.

Assign an issue

  1. Open your project and click Issues.
  2. Click an issue to open the detail panel.
  3. Click the Assignee menu (it shows Unassigned).
  4. Pick a member from the list. Type in Find member to filter by name or email.
The assignee menu open with Unassigned, Priya Natarajan and Sam Rivera
Pick a member, or choose Unassigned to remove the assignee.

A toast says Issue assigned successfully. The assignee's avatar now shows on the row in the list. To remove the assignee, open the menu and choose Unassigned. A toast says Issue unassigned successfully.

You can also set the assignee on the full issue page, in the Assignee card.

What the assignee gets

  • An in-app notification, Issue assigned to you, with the text "Priya Natarajan assigned you to issue: …".
  • An email, if their notification settings allow it. See Choose which email and in-app notifications you get.
  • Later in-app notifications, Issue status changed, when the status of that issue changes.

Note

Assigning several issues at once with the bulk Assign action sends no notification and writes no entry to the issue's activity. Only the assignment you make on a single issue notifies the person.

Comment on an issue

  1. Open the full issue page. From the detail panel, click View comments and activity.
  2. In the Comments tab, click the Write a comment... box below the existing comments.
  3. Type your message, then click Comment or press Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows).

A toast says Comment added. Your comment appears in the thread with your name and the time. The thread lists comments newest first.

The Comments tab with two comments, Sam Rivera's reply above Priya Natarajan's note
Everyone with access to the project sees the same comment thread.
  • A comment can be up to 5,000 characters.
  • Comments cannot be edited or deleted from the issue page, and there is no reply button, so write each comment so it can stand alone.
  • Every comment currently shows an (edited) label, even if it was never changed.

@mentions

You can type @ and a name in a comment, but there is no list to pick from, and mentions do not reliably notify people:

  • A mention only notifies a teammate whose profile name is a single word, typed exactly the same. For example, @Sam would notify a member named exactly "Sam".
  • A mention of a full name such as @Sam Rivera does not notify anyone.

If you need someone to see a comment, assign the issue to them. That reliably sends a notification.

The Activity tab

The Activity tab lists status changes and assignments, newest first, with who did it and when. Comments are in the Comments tab, not here.

The Activity tab listing status changes and an assignment
Activity records status changes and assignments.

Note

An assignment entry shows "Issue assigned to user" followed by a technical identifier rather than the person's name.

Keep reading