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community.atlassian.com should not require sign-in to just read

gwpantazes

I have a suggestion to improve Atlassian Community:

Atlassian Community should not require user sign-in just to view/read threads.

As a user coming in from Google, it is annoying and cumbersome to have to sign-in to actually read a thread. I see the thread contents load completely, so I could have seen the thread, except the page gets immediately intercepted/redirected to a sign-in page.

Some users may not need sign in because they just want to read. For these users, forced sign-in is offputting.

I would suggest, as an improvement to Atlassian Community, removing the forced sign in flow for just viewing threads. Users should only be required to sign in if they plan on interacting with the thread.

I'm not sure if there are reasons for the forced sign-in, such as trying to get more onboarding/engagement, or preventing attacks such as DDOS or something but

Onboarding/Engagement: Forced sign in just to view was very frustrating for me because I didn't want to sign up/participate at that moment, I thought viewing would be simple and public.
Preventing attacks: The whole thread page contents get loaded anyway, which is a redundant waste of bandwidth if it just gets loaded again after sign in. I don't think the forced sign in has any positive effect on preventing attacks

All in all, I would just recommend taking off the forced-sign in because I found it pretty annoying. I'm not sure if any other users would agree, but take note that I'm coming from a visitor's coming-from-google perspective.

Comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Er, you don't.

I need to sign in to post and to see some protected areas, but I don't need to sign in to see most of the questions, discussions or articles. I've just been able to read your posting without logging in at all. I've logged in now to make this comment.

gwpantazes

Hm... Well I definitely jumped to a conclusion about the forced sign in. Something must be going on then.

The forced sign in happened in this context:

Google for "sourcetree bookmarks"
Click on the relevant link to the thread "What bookmarks?!" (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Sourcetree-questions/What-bookmarks/qaq-p/1012478)
Land on Atlassian Community thread, and experience forced/redirected sign in

But now that I'm checking both the URL itself and the same from-google linking in an incognito browser, I'm not experiencing the forced sign in.

Maybe what I was experiencing was cookie-weirdness from some past event. :shrug:

In any case, if it was just my problem, it seems to be no longer reproducible even on my end, so this suggestion can be ignored.

Thanks for adding a dose of sanity, @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

My best guess is the same as yours - hangover data. I'd guess you've logged into a system (Sourcetree?) with an Atlassian account. Community has tried to be "clever" when you visit, based on what it found there, but something went wrong and it got confused with Google, so it asked for a login again. Really annoying...