Thanks for the reply back, Ignat. I saw on answers.atlassian.com where a few people were talking about using the method you describe to attack the problem. They were talking about turning the panel off entirely for certain projects (rather than just hiding the "create branch" link) and seemed to be having mixed success at best. In general, I try to avoid using putting a lot of javascript in the announcement banner just to overcome UI issues in the product anyway.

For now, I'm trying to get people to just live with it. On the old source tab, we could configure the number of files shown for each commit before it tosses you over to fisheye to see more. I don't see a way to do that here either, which is not helping me make the case that this is an improvement. :-/

Hi Dave, 

Unfortunately we are not planning to update the current development panel in the foreseeable future. I've read your comment before where you explain that it's not easy to remove the panel as some developers in your organisation do use the feature.

The idea is to add a custom field that would execute a javascript and customise the panel for you, i.e. which would allow to hide the panel for some developers.

 This is not officially supported - but can solve the problem for you until you migrate to git.

Some related links:

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira062/fields-allowing-custom-html-or-javascript-588581450.html
• https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/45825/how-to-remove-options-from-a-multi-version-picker-field

Cheers,
Ignat
JIRA Bugmaster.

Not that anyone will see this, but after two years we finally caved in and enabled the developer panel. We have more teams on git/BitBucket now, so we really wanted the extra functionality provided.

On the negative side, this issue still hasn't been fixed, so we have to explain to developers who are on projects that are using subversion/fisheye/crucible that they should not click on the "create branch" link. And we also have to explain to all developers in general that we can't suppress the "create branch" link when it shouldn't be shown (i.e. project isn't using BitBucket, or isn't applicable to a certain issue type or status).

To make matters worse, all the email I'm sending to our developers from Jira on this topic get delivered with messed up sender name thanks to JRA-30224. So half our team thinks Jira's email is some kind of spam or phishing attempt. Really crappy user experience all around, Atlassian.