ALERT: Don’t use Confluence Cloud for public documentation

What is Confluence Cloud?

Confluence is a collaboration tool that brings people, knowledge, and ideas together in a shared workspace, so you can do your best work with the confidence of your entire organization’s expertise behind you.

While Confluence is open by default, you can also set structured permissions and restrictions. That means that, for example, you could share a project with a client, and have them comment on it, without them seeing anything else that you’re working on. Or you could make a space public so your customers can view your support content, but can’t edit it.

But Confluence Cloud has a serious problem, and CANNOT BE USED to publish documentation on the Internet.

Let me explain more:

Confluence Cloud Spaces can be opened so that anyone can enter and view the pages, even comment, or so Atlassian indicates. Here an example (public page of a Confluence space published in Jira Service Management portal):

It seems that Atlassian makes a distinction between Anonymous User and User authenticated in Atlassian (and not authenticated in your instance, or from outside the organization).

This means that any user who has not logged into Atlassian can see the documentation, we are talking about Anonymous Access.

BUT if the user comes from another Confluence Cloud, there we have the big problem, the user will receive a message to “request access” to the page? or worse yet, the user sees nothing and the display is Denied.

But WORSE still, Jira Service Management and its union with Confluence stops going for all those users!!

Atlassian is aware of the issue as demonstrated in this ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-30161

This Atlassian problem has affected the documentation of the MrAddon plugins and has possibly had consequences since users have not been able to access the documentation and perhaps we have lost them forever or they have been angry!

Possibly this problem has economic consequences for other providers that use Confluence Cloud and should be treated as an emergency by Atlassian, although the ticket clearly shows that they have not solved it since 2013

SUMMARY: Do not publish public documentation for your Atlassian plugins on Confluence Cloud

Yes… it’s quite a PARADOX

By MrAddon

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