Former user (Deleted) - how can we find out the name of the person who created the page?

Question

So...someone who was in a large corporate, created a confluence page...and it tracked their name and change history of the confluence page...but then that person left the organisation.

Often those people return to the organisation also...

Can the solution please be enhanced to retain the persons name?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Does the alphanumeric account id relate to a condensed username? (if this was presented, this in itself would be sufficient to provide a breadcrumb, to identify the author)

No, it is a hexidecimal hash.

Can this be taken up?

As I am not an Atlassian employee I can't speak to how they would feel about such a change request. I recommend that you contact your internal Atlassian product administrators and ask them to open a support case directly with Atlassian to get this documented as a change request.

Note that if the accounts are owned by your company, then your company can implement a policy of deactivating them rather than deleting them.

Here is additional information on what happens when a user's account is deleted:

What happens when an account is deactivated vs. deleted?

Richard Agius · Answer

Thank you so much @Trudy  for the quick response.

I have worked on GDPR concepts before and my understanding is that it is a 'right to be forgotten'.  This would therfore only apply had the author explicitly asked to be forgotten, which has not occurred in this case.

Does the alphanumeric account id relate to a condensed username? (if this was presented, this in itself would be sufficient to provide a breadcrumb, to identify the author)

Can this be taken up?

Thanks in advance

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Richard Agius

Was the user using an account managed by the company?

Did the company deactivate the user, or delete the user's account?

If the account is simply deactivated, then I believe the Atlassian products should continue to show the user's name because the product can still find an Atlassian Cloud Account for the user.

If the account has been deleted entirely, then the product cannot show a name. The product includes only the alphanumeric account ID for the user, and uses that to dynamically display the associated user's name. If the account has been deleted from Atlassian Cloud, then the products no longer have the ability to get the user's name. The use of IDs instead of names was implemented to satisfy GDPR.