Invitation link expired after few minutes or wrongly generated

[Federico Scala]

Hi all!

I have an issue with the validity of invitation links.

I have sent out 100 invitations to new customers, sending them in batches of 20 each from the dedicated section of the project.

People are registering successfully but randomly some of them have the link saying that "Something went wrong, the link has expired, ..." even if the invitation has been sent less than an hour before. This is happening on approx the 20% of the total users registered (that is a pretty high failure rate...).

Is there any issue on the automatic link generation? Could they be generated maybe corrupted or duplicated?

Do you know any possible action to avoid this?

Thank you!

Federico

[Angélica Luz]

Hello @Federico Scala,

Thank you for reaching out to Atlassian Community!

The customer invitations for the customer portal have a 28 days expiration, so if the customer doesn’t exist on the site, they shouldn’t receive the error message.

Can you please share with us a screenshot of the error they receive?

Do the affected customers have the same email domain?

It would be important also check if the invitation link works on an incognito window. This is just to make sure that there are no extensions preventing it from working.

Are they brand new customers or they already had an account (for example, an internal licensed account or a deactivated account)?

Since in Jira Service Management it’s not possible to resend an invitation, for now, they will need to go to the portal (xxxxxx.atlassian.net/servicedesk), add their email address > click on next and click on the link “Forgot your password?”, so they will be able to login to the portal. 

Kind regards,
Angélica

[Federico Scala]

Hi Angélica,

thank you for your response! Here is a screenshot of the error:

It's in Italian, the translation is something like: "Something went wrong. Invitation link has expired. Ask a new link to an administrator, or login."

I answer to your other questions:

1. All the users are on the same company domain, which is the only allowed in the admin settings

2. The link doesn't work even on incognito window

3. All users were brand new users on Jira

As a workaround, when link was not working (I did it right yesterday):

1. I deleted the customer both from the service project and from the admin service management section

2. resend invitation, one by one

The weird thing is that even in this situation, sometimes the new link still didn't work and only doing this for a third time it finally worked. I also considered some issues on the timezone but everything is correctly setup in the admin panel and all users are in the same country with the same settings.

I'm finding hard times in getting a reason for this since it seems completely randomic. Luckly the workaround can be used in the end.

In future I will also consider to ask the user to use the password reset to access without the need of a new link, as you proposed.

Please let me know your thoughts if any clue comes to your mind.

Thank you!

Federico

[Angélica Luz]

Thank you for the details, @Federico Scala.

I was able to replicate this issue, here is what happens.

I added a new customer with a test email to a project, the invitation was sent. 

Instead of clicking to finish signup, I went to the portal and clicked to create an account and received another notification to sign up and used this new one.

Once I clicked on the first notification, it shows the error message.

From my test, the issue happens because the account already exists.

I searched for similar issues and it was fixed by deleting the customer and adding them again and it was random too, it happened with a custom domain and Gmail.

May I know if the affected customers are using a mail client like Outlook? Usually, people add more than one email address when using a mail client and maybe they were being redirected to the link but using the wrong account.  

[Federico Scala]

Hi @Angélica Luz ,

thank you for your deep analysis. It seems that this is the case: in fact we are using our custom company domain and every user is using Outlook. Everyone for sure had opened the link starting from Outlook and I think that some of them have also more than one account configured (for example, one personal company mail and one common mail of their company department).

I cannot be sure that everyone with the expired link did have also multiple accounts configured, but for sure at least some of them.

I cannot still understand why after re-sending additional invitations, sometimes in the end they work fine (maybe they were starting from the right account in Outlook), but I hope that this analysis could be helpful from your stand point of view for possible future enhancements.

P.S. As a last additional information, in our Jira setup users are not allowed to create accounts by themselves on the portal, only on invitation link.

Thanks!

Federico