Actually one of my contacts told me last weeks that they identified the issue and potential "financial relevance" is increasing.

Maybe the way forward for all of us (291 votes) is to generate one new site per business week. I do not know what are the costs a free tenant generates but 
291 votes * 1 per week * 52 weeks per year = 15.132 * Cost p. Tenant p. y. = Some-Money

I stopped cleaning up Atlassian "Ads Tenants" and told them that I won't do it anymore. I expecting that this will change - hopefully 2025

This seems like an endless soap...

It is quite simple: the way how the login procedure and site/product creation work, should NOT depend on Google search results.

For a logged in managed user, there should be NO WAY to bypass the policies or and create a new site.

I tested with searching Google for "jira", and the top sponsored link unfortunately behaves the same way as with Confluence. Welcoming you by name, and prompting you to create a NEW SITE that you do not want:

And the first organic search result for Jira does do the right thing, showing you a site that you already have access to:

Hey dnguyen4 - it looks like some aggressive Google sponsored results that your sales/marketing team have purchased are still leading users to accidentally create sites when they are just trying to log in. 

Ok, tested on mobile. The problem is whoever is buying Google sponsored results for Confluence is routing them to an old page, bypassing the new workflow that shows you sites your account already has access to.

So what is happening:

• User forgets name of Confluence Cloud instance, types in "confluence" into their phone
• Google displays a Sponsored link at the top for Confluence:
  

• It's the first result, so people tap on it. Even though they are already logged into Atlassian, they get this:
  

• They see "Welcome back, [THEIR NAME]" at the top see a site that includes the name of their company-team, so they click the big blue button.
• Accidental site is created.

But wait! What if they click the "organic" (real) first search result for Confluence? The one that you have to scroll down to. It looks like this:

And clicking on that link takes you to the NEW fixed flow that you guys fixed:

So can you PLEASE get your marketing/sales folks to STOP redirecting their sponsored search results to the page that BYPASSES the fix for all of these accidentally created sites?

That link looks like this:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence?gclsrc=aw.ds&&campaign=18312196225&adgroup=138055852541&targetid=kwd-22737151&matchtype=e&network=g&device=m&device_model=&creative=696317320971&keyword=confluence&placement=&target=&ds_eid=700000001542923&ds_e1=GOOGLE&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAD2bkRfe2xof0n_FTrcDw_2fm8vfI&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIqbneiZyVjAMVNQitBh0EUR5XEAAYASAAEgJGHPD_BwE

dnguyen4 - do you need more validation that this issue is resolved? How can we ensure that these changes are not part of some test, but rather will 100% get permanently deployed?

Hey 7a79c351a973 - thanks again for pushing to get this made into a ticket. I've posted some screenshots over here in the Community Forums. Let me try embedding them here:

I have to go kill about 3 sites a month, and for each of those, I have to wait 3 months for data deletion. Reducing the occurrence is most welcome.

Thanks for sharing! Now it looks a lot better indeed. 

I just checked the sign-up flows for Confluence and Jira again, and it actually looks like some changes have already been made that will help with this ticket. For example, the following procedure:

• Go to https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
• Click "Get it free"
• Enter your work email address
• Sign in via your identity provider

This used to result in a page that prompted you to set up a new site with the site name pre-filled, but now it's showing a page with a big "Go to confluence" button that takes you to your existing site, with a small "start new site" link down the bottom. Same thing with Jira.

So hopefully fewer new sites being accidentally created now?

(Edit: replaced image with text)

Give me the ability to disable this customer hostile garbage for free. You should not be charging extra to turn it off. 

https://getsupport.atlassian.com/browse/CA-3376632

Same here!

I also highly recommend anyone to send your opinion on this topic to the CEO of Atlassian:

• https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

Besides that, you can also comment/follow/vote all articles/issues/request that apply for you:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-10325
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-11690
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-12089
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-12193
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1135
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1272
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1468
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1645
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1651
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1679
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ID-7697
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Articles/What-s-the-word-I-m-looking-for/ba-p/2862486
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/SECURITY-ISSUE-during-login-procedure-of-managed-users/qaq-p/2841895
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Account-questions/How-to-Prevent-Atlassian-Products-being-added-by-users-w-company/qaq-p/2401874
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions/Why-is-Atlassian-promoting-Shadow-IT-Or-Accidental-IT/qaq-p/2731538
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Enterprise-articles/An-update-on-product-requests-bringing-shadow-IT-controls-to/ba-p/2840760
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Articles/Proposal-to-prevent-Accidental-Site-Creations-accidentalit/ba-p/2867193#M558

5eaf917f85cc 

"Atlassian support's vision of solving this problem is completely disconnected from reality."

I love this statement. 100% on target. Atlassian doesn't feel like it's on the "same team" as its org admins any more. The product has been intentionally evolved/mutated to work against the administrators trying to maintain it. 

We are also evaluating other options as my confidence and satisfaction with Atlassian products erodes away.

Hello,

We faced a similar reply as 408621841d67 . We are an organization with nearly 30,000 users in the information system, and Atlassian support's vision of solving this problem is completely disconnected from reality.

I do not understand why the ability to configure this setting is restricted to Enterprise versions of the products. This configuration makes no sense. As the organization administrator, I should have the ability to make these adjustments, not the product tied to a specific license.

For this and several other reasons, we have gradually started moving away from Atlassian services and products because they simply don’t focus on what actually needs to be resolved. The funniest part is that when someone complains, they are referred to the implementation policy or the bug and update policy. But none of the managers seem to care that there are publicly available tickets that haven’t been touched for as long as 12 years. This is despite the claim that the more votes a ticket has, the higher its priority should be.

For me, Atlassian's attitude and approach are a big disappointment. Years ago, I thought everything was great, but now...

Hello, I have guard and the same concern. users at the first connection, connects with the wrong url and it creates a site, then we must unsubscribe and wait to delete the site. The support gave me this solution: 

• to communicate the url of my site but this won't be done for new users and I'll have the same problem with each new user. 
• One way to tackle this is by introducing a firewall rule in your corporate network/VPN. This will restrict access to certain addresses, like:
  •    https://admin.atlassian.com/o/create
  •    https://www.atlassian.com/try
  •    https://www.atlassian.com/try/*
  By doing this, your managed users won’t be able to create Atlassian organizations themselves. This means no accidental product creation and a more secure environment for everyone!
  Note: This rule won’t block you from adding products to your current organization, but it will prevent the creation of separate cloud sites. 

but for me, it's a bug that you needs to fix

8f4050917dd7 we do use Guard. I've done that a few times before (take over admin), but there are some I cannot, plus there are so many steps to do in order to delete...I cannot do that for almost 50 sites. 

cfc96e320363 - based on what you wrote, can I assume that you don't subscribe to Atlassian Guard, so you're unable to take over admin for the accidentally created sites yourself, which is Atlassian's "official solution"?

UGH, that... sucks. I'm really sorry that you're meeting that kind of resistance from Support. I'm going to see if there's any escalation available that I could help with.

I logged a support ticket to request the deletion of 40+ sites people have created since we migrated to cloud.  

They said I need to contact the creator...which, that's not helpful if they ignore me or are no longer with the company. Said to "contact your IT to take over their mailbox if these people are no longer available, then access these instances and submit delete requests. " Uh, that would be a no? 

Also, "If one of your managed {accounts} creates an instance, Atlassian understands they are spinning up a separate instance" - well that's dandy but the users don't understand that. These users have no idea what they are doing, and are even less likely to follow the instructions provided to delete the site.

I would like some help with this, also. We have had multiple instances of managed account users creating new products accidentally. And yes, we can take those over and clean them up but especially because of the cancellation time windows, this is a 90+ day process - which is very annoying for us Atlassian org admins.

I think i'm going to follow 2ea96d18fded lead and ask my team to raise a support ticket every time this happens. We are up to 11 and agree this is a frustration.

OOOF, 3 new sites created in the last 24 hours. So already an update:

• Number sites created by since migrating to Cloud with "managed" users: 66
• Average number of days between new sites accidentally being created: 4.38 days

Thanks you dnguyen4 for filing this and for 7a79c351a973 for helping to get it framed correctly.

So... I think Atlassian likes data, yes? Here's some data.

#accidentalit Index

(in the spirit of Harper's Index)

• Date of migration from Server to Cloud (Jira, Confluence, JSM): 2024-05-19
• Number of users: 6000
• Number of sites accidentally on that first day: 1
• Time elapsed since migrating to Cloud with "managed" users: 8 months and 1 week
• Number sites created by users in that time: 63
• Number of sites actually intended to be created by those users: 0
• Longest number of days where new site was not accidentally created: 36
• Average number of days between new sites accidentally being created: 4.5
• Number of sites where we never received notice of site creations: 5
• Number of support tickets created to expedite deletion of sites: 22 (I used to consolidate requests)
• Average time from filing support ticket to deletion of sites: 17.6 days 

So tired of Atlassian wasting my time with this nonsense.

They know exactly what they're doing by only making the feature to stop this from happening available to Enterprise subscriptions.

Every time a group of new hires join our company, at least one of them ends up accidentally creating their own site. 

Fix this, Atlassian. Until it is fixed I am going to create a support ticket every single time it happens.

I concur with Peter Fjelsten. I have way too much going on to have to worry about sites being created. Please fix this ASAP.

Leading to lot's of wasted time for Jira admins!

This is a very big problem. It was further exacerbated by the implementation of a new billing center, where instances are removed for more than 2 months in the traditional way, and if you submit a ticket to support it is 15 days. Still, that's 15 days too long in waiting to clean up what the user did through a total poorly designed flow by Atlassian. In my case, we now have 5 sites waiting to be removed, established only since December. 

Three last week.

One already this week.

This is a huge nuisance.

This is happening quite frequently at our company, too - every week I play whack-a-mole with the external sites that were accidentally created. It takes a bit of time to clean up the mess and causes stress to our end-users. 
Until a true management system is implemented in which we can restrict creation of external sites from being created in the first place, could you please at least add bolder warnings and a cancel button with an obviously displayed warning that a new site is being created (& not the company site that was expected)? 
Thank you for your attention to this issue! 
Best, Kim-Stacey 

Just in the last two weeks I've have four different users create new sites. At least two of them were just trying to access our corporate Jira instance and somehow managed to create a new site. It's way too easy for users who don't understand how to Jira to create a new site.

Hi all,

For customers already paying quite a lot of money for products that have the words "PREMIUM", "MANAGED USER" or "GUARD" in the product names, the only good solution is to make the users really managed.

This can only be achieved by making sure that any user, who is not an organization admin, cannot create new sites or products. This is also the only way that Atlassian can provide a solution to their customers, that meets very basic security standards.

Any product that does not have these kind of controls, is insecure by default.

Just my 2 cents,

Stefaan

PS: for anyone interested in this topic, there are a bunch of articles/reports/requests (and this is just a small selection):

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-10325
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-12089
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1135
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1645
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1468
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ID-7697
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ACCESS-1679
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Articles/What-s-the-word-I-m-looking-for/ba-p/2862486
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/SECURITY-ISSUE-during-login-procedure-of-managed-users/qaq-p/2841895
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Account-questions/How-to-Prevent-Atlassian-Products-being-added-by-users-w-company/qaq-p/2401874
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions/Why-is-Atlassian-promoting-Shadow-IT-Or-Accidental-IT/qaq-p/2731538
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Enterprise-articles/An-update-on-product-requests-bringing-shadow-IT-controls-to/ba-p/2840760
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Articles/Proposal-to-prevent-Accidental-Site-Creations-accidentalit/ba-p/2867193#M558

Hello,

we are also suffering from this problem. A cool thing would be, beside your suggested solutions, if we could set up our own text like "We are using Jira/Confluence already at our company. Please use those instead of creating a new instance!"

Thanks for creating this! IMHO, only the last two suggestions will significantly reduce the number of mistakes. The other ones won't trigger naive users that are either new to Confluence/Jira or only very occasionally use it.

Thanks so much for creating this ticket. Accidental site creations are a real annoyance for a lot of admins out there - see comments https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ID-7697 for example.

I'll just make a couple of points:

• Accidental site creation doesn't just happen for new users who have been invited or who are trying to sign in/up for the first time. In my experience it's existing users who just can't remember the login link. They go to the Jira / Confluence product page, and enter their email address into the "sign up" form (or click the "Get Confluence free" button), thinking it's a login form. They're then prompted to create a new site by default.
• The "Compass" sign-up form (https://www.atlassian.com/try/cloud/signup?bundle=compass) does it better - it auto-populates the existing site making it read-only. The user has to intentionally click the "Start a new site" link to create a new site.