I had a look at the description of this bug, but it does not seem to be an actual bug

From what I understand, the problem is that, if Confluence is not configured with anonymous access, and if the Customer does not have a user account in Confluence, this user will not be able to search for KB articles from the customer portal.

This behavior is not a bug, but expected by design. As we see in the documentation Set up a knowledge base with Confluence Server, one of the steps consists in the following:

Have the same user base in both Jira and Confluence by one of the following methods:

Therefore, if Confluence and Jira don't have the same user base, and if Confluence is not configured with anonymous access, it is expected that Customers will not be able to search for KBs.

For this reason, I will close this bug as "invalid", since it is not a bug, but an expected behavior.

Just to clarify: This was an actual bug in the Cloud instance. Atlassian was able to fix it and it works correctly now. 

@Brad Taplin: I didn't mean to be rude. But it was (and hopefully never will) never intended that portal users consume licenses. Those users "read" articles and do not write them. 

You can configure your portal/JSM/confluence in a way that anon is disabled, only users from your organization (e.g. with "atlassian.com" email adresses) can create accounts, and those "users" or not confluence users, but JSM customers. Customers do not consume licenses and can read articles of the connected KB.

Henning, I hear ya and did not write on behalf of either Atlassian or my employer. It was an observation. If anon is disabled then users who do connect, in this case anyhow, consume licenses. Larger orgs like mine can strike licensing deals with vendors, smaller orgs not so easily.

Either i am missing something (very possible) or Atlassian is actively forcing me to turn away from their products. JSM was designed as an internal help portal (if i remember correctly) - and from my point of view it cant be the logical conclusion that everyone who actually needs help needs an agent license for JSM. I want customers to see KB-articles in their search or in the requests forms without spending on user licenses. I hope @Brad Taplin that this is not a "design choice". 

We are using the JSM in the Cloud and if JSM customers cant search for KB-articles it is basically useless for most use case scenarios. 

At this point i am regretting that we invested in yearly licenses, training and content creation but i will make sure we switch before end of the year. Honestly it is hard to stay professional. 

Seems more of a design choice than a bug, to be honest, in that wherever two apps depend on OAuth (impersonation) to link the accounts using that link better exist in both locations, especially where anon access on the target is disallowed. I get that it's a pain, to consider buying licenses for all users in both apps if all one wants is the kb from Confluence, but...

Am I missing something?

Our version is SD 3.13.2. and we have a similar problem

we are facing this issue as well, we are planning to use this system but this is the main reason we have not implemented it to our customers

I would really like to see this bug fixed in a reasonable time span so we can order the license.

We are also still seeing this issue. We have checked all settings and are not able to complete the workaround of assigning a JSD license. The cost of getting enough Confluence licenses to accommodate and the time/money/resources we have used because customer cannot support themselves will become substantial. It will be worth it for us to complete a cost/benefit analysis on a new service desk option.

This bug is a huge problem as the use of Confluence for knowledge base articles was a key point for using this system.

Come on Atlassian.  You can't promote something as a feature if it simply does not work.  That is false advertising!