Dashboard Notes

Dashboard Notes for Jira

Dashboard Notes puts a formatted note on any Jira dashboard. Write it in a small Markdown dialect with headings, links, lists, checklists, quotes, code and colored callouts. The dashboard owner and Jira admins decide who can change it, and everyone else just reads it.

It's a Forge app built with UI Kit. Notes are stored in Forge storage on Atlassian's cloud, and the app makes no calls outside Atlassian.

What you can write

# Release 4.2
Freeze starts **Friday 18:00**. Ask in [#release](https://chat.example.com/release) first.

- [x] Tag the build
- [ ] Update the status page
- [ ] Tell support

:::warning
No schema changes after Thursday.
:::

> Ship small, ship often.

Each new line in a paragraph starts a new line in the gadget, so notes look the way you typed them.

Who can do what

The app asks Jira, as the signed-in user, whether they can see the dashboard and who owns it. It also checks whether they hold the "Administer Jira" global permission. Those checks run on the server for every read and every change, so a viewer can't get around them from the browser. People who aren't logged in see a prompt to log in.

Using it

1. Open a dashboard, choose Add gadget, and pick Dashboard Notes. Jira opens its Configure screen first. Choose Save (or Close, if you can't change settings), and the note appears.
2. Choose Edit note in the gadget. Write on the Write tab and check the Preview tab, then Save.
3. Open the gadget menu and choose Configure to add extra editors or change the display settings.

Each gadget has these settings.

• Extra editors (up to 20 people).
• Whether anyone who can see the dashboard can tick checklist items. It's off by default.
• Whether work item keys like OPS-12 turn into links. It's off by default, because text like UTF-8 would match too. Wrap a key in backticks to keep it plain.
• Whether to show who edited the note last, and when. It's on by default. Ticking a checklist item counts as an edit, so a viewer who ticks an item becomes the last editor. When it's off, people who can't edit the note don't get that information from the app at all. Only the owner and Jira admins get the list of extra editors.

Versions and conflicts

Every save keeps the version before it, up to the last 10. Editors can open Versions, look at an old one and restore it. A restore is saved as a new version, so it can be undone the same way. Ticking a checklist item changes the note but doesn't add a version, so ticks can't push saved versions out of the list.

If two people edit at once, the second save is refused with a message, and that person's text stays in the editor so nothing is lost. The same check applies to ticks.

Limits

• A note can hold 20,000 characters. Longer text is refused with a message, never cut. The editor keeps everything you paste, says how many characters to remove, and turns Save off until the note fits. The Preview tab stays empty until then.
• The gadget draws the first 1,000 blocks and list items and tells you how many it hid.
• Links must use http, https or mailto, or be a path on your Jira site. Other links (for example javascript:) are shown as plain text, exactly as typed, with a notice. Links that hide their host behind user@ are refused too. A link target can hold one pair of parentheses, as in Wikipedia links. A space inside the address makes the link plain text.
• Raw HTML is shown as text. There are no images, tables or custom CSS.
• Numbered lists always count from 1, because the UI Kit list component has no start number. Inside a paragraph only a line starting with 1. or 1) begins a list, so a line like 2024. Revenue doubled stays text.
• In checklist items, bold and italic are dropped from the label, and links in the item are shown next to it.
• Runs of four or more or _ in a row (like *x**) don't format the way CommonMark does. Some of the stars stay in the text.
• Parsing work per note has a fixed budget. Markup past it is shown as plain text with a notice, and normal notes never reach it. The slowest 20,000-character notes we could build for the tests, including the ones from three independent reviews, parse in under 0.1 s on a laptop.
• Each gadget has its own note. Copying a dashboard doesn't copy notes, and removing a gadget doesn't delete its stored note.

Privacy and data

The app stores the note text, the last 10 versions, the settings, and the Atlassian account IDs of the last editor, version authors and extra editors. All of it stays in Forge storage. Once a week the app checks those account IDs with Atlassian's personal data reporting API and removes the ones that belong to closed accounts. See PRIVACY.md.

Support Zovo

Zovo builds and maintains this app. If it saves you time, you can support the work on GitHub Sponsors. Sponsorship is optional, and the tool works the same without it.

Zovo is made by theluckystrike on GitHub.

More tools by Zovo

• Description Diff. Shows what changed in a Jira issue description, word by word.
• Epic Totals. Adds up story points, estimates and time logged for the children of a Jira epic.
• Expression Validators and Conditions. Adds workflow validators and conditions to Jira, with a test on a real issue.
• Filter Activity Stream. Shows what changed in a saved Jira filter or JQL query.

License

MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 Zovo.