Add Watchers and Vote buttons are greyed out in Team Managed Project issues

Platform Notice: Cloud Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.

Summary

Add Watchers and Vote buttons are greyed out in issues.

Environment

Jira/Jira Service Management cloud.

Diagnosis

  • In company-managed projects, project permissions govern the ability to add watchers and vote on issues.

  • In team-managed projects, the Administrator access role is required to be able to add watchers and votes to Jira issues.

  • In some cases, with the administrator role, the user notices that the Watchers and Voters buttons are greyed out.

Cause

In the Jira Settings > System > General Configuration (https://<sitename>.atlassian.net/secure/admin/ViewApplicationProperties.jspa), the ability to watch issues or vote on issues is set to OFF, which disables them across all of Jira.

Solution

In Jira Settings > System > General Configuration, click on Edit Settings and set the options below to ON:

  1. Allow users to vote on issues

  2. Allow users to watch issues

Updated on March 3, 2025

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