Confluence User count increasing without admin permission

[Srikanth G]

We have a server hosted instance of Confluence with 500 user licenses. Users cannot signup (Allow people to sign up to create their account is not checked) and any user addition is through admin only. I am the admin for my instance. Somehow, the user count goes up without my involvement. I had 426 users last night and in the morning user count went up to 431 and I made sure none of us in confluence-admin group added any users in the mean while. How is that posible?

Note: 1. our hosted confluence link has application link with our JIRA instance

2. We have several directories like Microsoft AD ( main user directory), JIRA interrnal Directory, XYZ directory etc. added under user directories in confluence. Please help.

[Mike Rathwell]

Srikanth,

I think Nic's comment that your last "note" is where the answer lies. If you use a AD or whatever group to provide access to the instance or a space, it counts against your license. SO... if your IT dept added users to an AD group that can access Confluence, it'll count against the license. I can't remember where I found it on the Atlassian pages but the following query against the Confluence backing store database is very useful to see where the users that count against your license are coming from:

SELECT DISTINCT u.lower_user_name, d.directory_name
FROM cwd_user u
JOIN cwd_membership m ON u.id = child_user_id
JOIN cwd_group g ON m.parent_id = g.id
JOIN SPACEPERMISSIONS sp ON g.group_name = sp.PERMGROUPNAME
JOIN cwd_directory d on u.directory_id = d.id
WHERE PERMTYPE='USECONFLUENCE' AND u.active = 'T' AND d.active = 'T'
ORDER BY d.directory_name;

I think if you're adding users via AD or other user authority groups, keep it up and worry less (although there is a cost when you run over the 500 for sure; a big one. I just did that) about the user count. If you go down the rabbit hole of discrete user accounts and accesses to keep your count down... well... that way lay madness.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The answer is probably in your note at the bottom - external systems are adding users with "can use Confluence" permissions. 

[Guilherme V.]

Hey there,

Only users with "Can Use" permissions are counted towards your license. Check the queries from this documentation to see if it will match as the Confluence's count(431).

Cheers,