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Suggestion
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Resolution: Unresolved
NOTE: This suggestion is for Confluence Cloud. Using Confluence Server? See the corresponding suggestion.
In large organizations, people come and go. People who have left have their user IDs disabled. The search screen will not let you entry the name of a user that is disabled. This is preventing us from finding content created by people who have left the organization. This is a major problem with replacement staff who attempt to pickup from where their predecessor left off.
As it stands now, when a user is disabled, they will not appear in the Contributor section of the search page. Since there have been previous requests to hide disabled users, it may be best to include a checkbox (or a toggle-switch) of some kind to include/exclude disabled users for the Contributor search.
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- Gathering Interest
[AI-792] Allow searching for content contributed or created by disabled user
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.
Confluence is a crucial platform for organizing your work effectively. Its true value shines through during handoffs. However, once the account of a departing employee is deactivated, you lose the ability to search for their work as a contributor, significantly diminishing the value of Confluence. Without access to the departing contributor's work, the handover process becomes challenging, and it becomes impossible to seamlessly continue from where they left off.
Therefore, the ability to retrieve user materials from a deactivated account is very much needed.
We also need this, especially when suspended users are deleted per policy after a period of time. Having to hunt for a page their ID is on to grab and force it into the search url is preventing us from finding some key information for an old document that doesn't have a sensible title.
Important feature in case somebody leaves a company. It's already possible in Jira by searching the email adress for issues reported by / assigned to an inactive user. Should also be possible in Confluence in the same way.
The usecase is obvious and significantly impacting my team currently. We have key individuals who have moved on from the company and new folks come in to replace them. Unfortunately these new folks are unable to get the benefit of the items documented by the inactive users, without cumbersome url modifications.
This feature seems fundamental. I have been squeaking by with some of the suggestions I find. But, it is not a good solution. We had an outstanding engineer who documented heavily in Confluence. Unfortunately, we cannot always find his work because we cannot search on his name. Huge loss.
Since this ticket has been here for 5 years, I conclude that Confluence will not fix.
Yeah, this is pretty huge. The ability to search for documentation with absent contributors' handles in the search field is MORE crucial thanthe ability to use current users' handles, because you can always just ask a current user. With inactive users' work (and knowledge), you have only confluence to rely on.
But @kevin mote's workaround, it's simple and effective, and plainly worded and saved my day.
To expound on dgamble's workaround:
You can manually edit the URL for the search to work. For example, here's a search URL if I select my own user as the Contributor:
I go to admin.atlassian.com, and I can compare the ID for my user plus the disabled one by right-clicking the username and copying the URL:
Mine:
Disabled user:
Therefore, I can then replace my ID with the one for the disabled user, and the search works:
@dgamble: Your suggestion about hand-crafting the URL as a workaround was just the clue I needed. I still hope this functionality gets added to JIRA, but this workaround gets me what I need today.
In case others stumble upon this thread, here's how it works:
Write a normal query and choose any active user in the query string. Run the search and notice the URL of the resulting window has that user's ID embedded in it. Replace that string with the ID of the disabled user and, voila!
This is very important to us. Likely most organization don't even realize this is an issue, until it is too late. I our case the Manager of HR left and her documents were not searchable. In this one-off we were able to un-disable her account, but we can't leave all departing staff enabled.
Atlassian, this is a relatively small fix as it is only the search screen that is preventing the lookup of the user - not the search that is broken. If you hand craft the url you can make the search work, but we can't teach all users to do this.
Thanks.
Hey folks, team is actively working on this. Hoping to have an ETA for rollout soon!