I've forwarded an announcement email from the INFRA team recently about disabling the public sign ups for jira.a.o because of spamming. And now the rule is finally applied, when you open jira.a.o, you can see there is a gray bar on the top to tell you 'Public signup for this instance is disabled. Our Jira Guidelines page explains how to get an account.'.
For me, I do not think it is easy for us to completely drop jira since it is the issue tracker we have been using for years and all our release processes are bound to it. So at least we need to find a way to let our contributors know how to acquire a jira account. The hive project decided to use a dedicated mailing list for acquiring a jira account. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/HowToContribute#HowToContribute-JIRA For me, I think maybe we could enable github issues for our users and contributors. They can ask questions and report issues there and if we think it is a bug that needs to be fixed, we could open a jira issue for it. And we could also create a special issue template for acquiring jira accounts. Thoughts? Thanks.
