Current Behaviour:

When a new user logs into Confluence Cloud for the first time, the system automatically pre-populates their sidebar with up to 4 "Starred Spaces." These are sourced from:

1. Cross-product collaborator activity (Collaboration Graph)

1. Fallback: the site's most popular spaces (by content activity in the last 30 days)

Since new users have no prior activity, they almost always receive the same set of popular spaces. This causes confusion — users and admins perceive these as randomly starred spaces, when in reality they are system-generated recommendations.

Problem:

• Admins have no control over which spaces are surfaced to new users on first login.

• The same spaces appear for every new user, which may not be relevant to their role or team.

• Users are confused by spaces they didn't star appearing as "Starred Spaces."

• There is no way to suppress this behaviour or curate a specific set of onboarding spaces.

Suggested Improvement:

Provide Confluence site admins with one or more of the following controls:

1. Disable auto-recommendations — option to turn off automatic space starring for new users entirely.

1. Curate default spaces — ability to specify which spaces should be pre-populated for new users (e.g., company handbook, onboarding space).

1. Per-group defaults — ability to assign different default spaces based on user group membership.

Use Case:

Organizations with structured onboarding processes want to control the first-login experience so new users see relevant company spaces rather than whichever spaces happen to be most active. This is especially important for large instances where the "popular" spaces may be irrelevant to most new joiners.

Workaround:

Users can manually unstar the pre-populated spaces after first login. There is no admin-side workaround.