Issues for external (Anonymous) users in Confluence cloud

Question

We are using Confluence Cloud to publish public product documentation. Users are not required to log in and is not registered as users on our site.

These are the issues we have seen for anonymous users:

* It should be possible to disable Activity,Spaces and Create on the header line.
* It should be possible to disable entries in the context meny (3 dots):* Resolved comments
* View in Hierarchy
* View Storage Format
* View Source

* Author and date for the page should be disabled.
* But most important: If you are logged on to Confluence Cloud with a user that is not registered as user on ours site you will not get access to the page. You will have to log out of Confluence Cloud.

Does anybody have experience using Confluence Cloud for public documentation or have any suggestions to these issues?

Thanks

Sven Erik Johansson

NHN - Norwegian Health Network

Sven Erik Johansson · Answer

We have also seen the 403 error and blank screen from time to time, but it is not consistent.

Sven Erik Johansson · Answer

Another issue is that the object link resolver does not work for anonymous users.  Se https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-68023.  Please vote for this bug.

The workaround that works for us is to remove the prefix  https://mysite.atlassian.net/ from every internal link in the fabric editor.

For pages imported from server and using the legacy editor, internal links behaves as expected.

Nicole_lftadf · Answer

My organization is using Confluence Cloud for public documentation as well and I've encountered the same frustrations you mention. I find it frustrating when an anonymous user hits a login page and can't get back to the home (overview) page. This should never happen. The user experience for anonymous users is majorly lacking and we've expressed these concerns to our sales reps and product managers, in the community, and via a focus group; but Atlassian seems to be focusing on the internal use of the product among teams rather than public use. In addition, the metrics are lacking. When we tried using Google Analytics the data is limited by Atlassian. The Analytics available in Premium is extremely limited to users (anonymous and logged in) and pages visited.

We've been having an issue for over a month now where anonymous users can't access the site. They either get a 403 error or a blank screen with the Atlassian logo in the middle of the page. Super frustrating to not have this yet resolved. What's the point of having a website people can't access?