Hey folks, team is actively working on this. Hoping to have an ETA for rollout soon!

It will very useful if you implement this feature ASAP. If not, you can provides us the walkaround steps

I think we can get the list of pages created by the deactivated user. This is how I was able to find. 

Open the space, expand the 'Space contributors' list. There I could see all users who contributed, including deactivated users. Click on the names and it shows all (or most ) of the pages created by them. 

Hi,

My company (LBAppStudio) has created a solution for Confluence Cloud to list all pages owned by deactivated users.  Please find it here:  https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1234489/reports-plus-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview. We are happy to consider any enhancement requests!

Curious about how/when a user's license gets deactivated and whether there is a process documented anywhere? Or perhaps it's associated with their email. No rush, but if someone could let me know, I appreciate it, as always 🙂

You can also find the user's ID if you can find a page that they are already on either as an @tag or a known contributor then you can click on their name which will take you to their user profile.  The URL for the profile has the ID.

And I like that... Dereliction of Duty.

I agree with several commenters below. What is written in confluence is very important for handoffs, i.e. it becomes important after the author leaves the company and you can't find what they wrote. This is a very important defect.

We need to rethink why we create deliverables and leave them in confluence and not elsewhere. There are plenty of tools that are easier to create and more beautiful (e.g. MSoffice), but the reason we create and leave them in confluence is to be able to search them quickly. If this search functionality doesn't work, confluence loses its usefulness.

In other words, this is a dereliction of duty on Atlassian.

You can also find materials from employees who are still employed by asking them directly. However, I can't ask directly for deliverables from people who have left the company; I have to find them, but they're not searchable. How contradictory.

I see the URL workaround.  Unfortunately, a user needs admin permissions to use admin.atlassian.com.

Is there a workaround that allows a normal user to find old documents?  I don't want to have to contact an admin in my company every time I want to search for an old document.

95% of the time that I am searching by user is when they are no longer with the company.  We are a medium size company of ~100 people so I know what everyone is responsible for.  If i cannot find something that I know a coworker authored I just ask them.  But when they are no longer there to ask... well that is when I really need to be able to search by user!

This is a very frustrating bug with seemingly no justification, the search can support disabled/inactive users (as per the workaround from Don and the expanded version by Shannon) but they are not populated in the options. This is not configurable? We have several employees who worked across our company's Confluence, each contributing many pages, including their offboarding pages documenting their latest work. We cannot search for the pages worked on by those employees because they are deactivated. This was only discovered months or years after the employees left, when we had the staff to revisit their work. I can only imagine that searching by user is most common when the user is no longer with the company. Otherwise I could ask them. It's disheartening to see that this has been an open issue since 2016. Hoping to see a fix in the future.