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Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues
- FreezerburnV 6y agoThe specific part of the ToS being referred to: (i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products
- simon1ltd 6y agoNothing says “great product” like a ToS that bans you from discussing the problems. I self-host a confluence install, and it’s performance is poor even with a good sized VM and absolutely zero other traffic to it.
- Buttons840 6y ago"I won't comment on the performance, but let's just say there's a reason their TOS forbids talking about it." If you ban objective criticism, I guess all you're left with is FUD.
- icameron 6y agoYep Confluence is an amazingly overly complicated thing! I had it on modern windows server that boots up in 60 seconds. From that time, confluence starting up take no less than 10 minutes before it responds to web requests. Fortunately we switched to Teams this year, no more exorbitant confluence renewal fees and clueless support.
- jjuhl 6y ago"Yep Confluence is an amazingly overly complicated thing" - yeah,with an incredibly slow editor that screws up even simple page edits constantly. It's a complete shit show. There's a reason we call it "cuntfluence" at my workplace.
- trevorishere 6y agoSharePoint Server is an absolute beast with a bunch of legacy code yet it has no issues being responsive as soon as it JITs (which can take ~30 second so or so after an App Pool startup). SPO is also responsive (the last thing to load is typically the SuiteNav which doesn't impact working with the site/content). I'm not sure why a company like Atlassian would have these persistent performance issues.
- odiroot 6y agoIt's the Oracle school of public relations via litigation.
- NotChina 6y agoSo much for SLAs?
- confluence_perf 6y agoThis is certainly a strange thing to have in there, as we've had public discussions about performance before and I assume no one's accused those customers of violating the ToS. I'll see if I can find someone inside Atlassian to talk about this part of the ToS (edit: Looks like other users have found similar clauses in other companies, so it seems like it might be standard legalese. Will still see if I can find out more)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- twblalock 6y agoEvery Atlassian product I've used has had scalability problems. Instead of trying to hide them, they should work on fixing them.
- gonzo41 6y agoIf only there was a product that helped size up work and let teams manage a backlog of features. :D But I agree totally.
- macinjosh 6y agoJIRA IS SLOW. sue me.
- chrisandchris 6y agoHow bad has your performance to be until you explicitly prohibit people using your service talking about the performance issue? I‘ll wait until they discontinue the service for a customer because he did not respect this ToS section.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoThe most innocent explanation is preventing benchmarks against similar tools which could be unflattering. Though the only other company that resorts to such insecure measures is Oracle.
- detaro 6y agoway more companies do that than just those two.
- cortesoft 6y agoThe comment right next to yours is a link to cloudflare's TOS with the exact same provision. It is not just Atlassian and Oracle.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoI meant to include "that I know of" but was too lazy to edit. Anyway, it's still a bad sign IMO. Signaling desperation instead of concern for user experience.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- papafox 6y agoI don't read section 3.3(i) as preventing criticism of performance, rather it prohibits the release performance benchmarks without further permission from Atlassian. Having been on the receiving end of competitors running 'benchmarks' on a service I worked on, and the trumpeting the very contrived and out of context figures, I can understand why Atlassian is trying to prevent it from happening to them. Pity that it probably won't work.
- vsskanth 6y agoIf your competition is misrepresenting your product in benchmarks can't you just sue for defamation ? There's also the option of counter articles
- judge2020 6y agoCloudflare has this as well: >you will not and you have no right to: ... (f) perform or publish any benchmark tests or analyses relating to the Cloud Services without Cloudflare’s written consent; https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/#react-modal:~:text=(f)%20perform%20or%20publish%20any%20benchmark,Cloud%20Services%20without%20Cloudflare%E2%80%99s%20written%20consent%3B https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/#react-modal:~:text=(f)%20p...
- emilfihlman 6y agoThis is just awful
- mattm 6y agoAs a software engineer who has been woken up in the middle of the night while oncall because some random user wanted to run their own performance tests against our system, I can completely understand why companies want to prevent this from happening without their awareness.
- jiggawatts 6y agoa) That's not the reason. b) Rate limiting is practically mandatory in an era of multi-gigabit client network connections on even mobile phones. Remember: It's not a DDoS attack if it's one user.
- smarx007 6y agoWell, an "average" HN user may use something like a load testing tool such as https://github.com/loadimpact/k6 https://github.com/loadimpact/k6 or at least rent a few VMs with 10Gbps links for a few hours and use wrk/ab so I would not be so sure about (a). Edit: oh, and then they might dust off that Kali Linux VM lying around somewhere...
- jiggawatts 6y agoWhich ought not to matter if you use a CDN and use basic source-IP based rate limiting.
- social_quotient 6y agoSo the language highlighted here is: (i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products; But can we take a minute to talk about the combination of these two : (h) use the Cloud Products for competitive analysis or to build competitive products; (j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing. Does this mean as a jira user I can’t help build a jira competitor for a client of mine ( we are a tech agency). If this is the case I would really have a hard time using jira and being compliant. After all, who is the arbiter on what jira is exactly?But does this also mean people can’t do reviews on the platform as means to compare to other platforms? I’m a bit speechless here, it’s a wtf sort of thing.
- madamelic 6y agoNot just Jira, but also all Atlassian products which includes HipChat, Trello, OpsGenie and a load of other products.
- hertzrat 6y agoImagine if products prior to the 90s or outside software had these sorts of “agreements.” Every store in a mall would have them and every piece of fruit in a grocery store would require you to agree to arbitration clauses and privacy policies and non disclosure and non competition. Consumer reports and class action suits would not exist, and nobody would really be allowed to talk about it because of the NDAs. Automated facial and voice recognition in smart home devices could sell data to companies to enforce it. The news would not be able to talk about it. It would be a good setup for a dystopian movie, no?
- texasbigdata 6y agoAlso they changed in MIDFLIGHT. At least only apply it to new customers who have a choice whether to be forced to do this.
- unixhero 6y agoAtlassian Cloud customer here. Large enterprise. The Jira and Confluence cloud products are slow as fuuuuuck.
- confluence_perf 6y agoSorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? (edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays)
- eitland 6y agoNot GP but I also have the same feeling across Atlassian products: it is more like a general feeling all the time for many of us. I'm using the latest Firefox on Windows, a developer laptop with 32GB memory that was brand new this spring as well as 500/500 fiber.
- confluence_perf 6y agoIs this also on Cloud products? Right now on holiday (through Tuesday), but would like learn more. I see your contact info in your profile, if you give consent I'd like send you an email on Wednesday with some followup questions (the first question is "what is the URL for your cloud instance" so I don't want to be asking for it on a public forum) (edit: typo)
- crooked-v 6y ago> Is this also on Cloud products? On my company's cloud instance of Jira, it's a minimum of a 2-3 second delay to do anything. Edit, wait a few seconds, save, wait a few seconds, change a field, wait a few seconds... and God help you if you need to reload the page because something got stuck.
- burnthrow 6y ago
- josh_atlassian 6y agoJust so everyone is aware, this is Atlassian's stance on that language taken from the internal guidance on the ToS. To be clear I'm not defending this stance as I think it is flawed. But I wanted you guys to know what Atlassians are told about it - ------------------------------------------------------ Section 3.3: Benchmarking Can you explain Atlassian's stance on Benchmarking? Like many other software companies, Atlassian has this language in its terms to protect users from flawed reviews and benchmarks. By requiring reviewers to obtain Atlassian’s consent before publicly disseminating their results, Atlassian can confirm their methodology (i.e. latest release, type of web browser, etc.) and make sure they deliver verifiable performance results. Atlassian is not trying to prevent any users from internally assessing the performance of our products. The language related to the public distribution of performance information has been included in our customer agreement since 2012. Customers can obtain Atlassian's consent by filing a Support ticket. The Support engineer will then need to bring in a PMM for approval of the data/report. ------------------------------------------------------
- sand_castles 6y ago> Atlassian has this language in its terms to protect users from flawed reviews and benchmarks. The solution to lies is not to censor, but transparency. Atlassian has all the resources in the world to answer any external benchmarks done by third party. If you can hire an army of lawyers, surely its possible to have a full-time engineer running benchmarks.
- ineedasername 6y agoThat explains the stance but is not sufficient to justify it. It gives Atlassian infinite power to stomp on any benchmark that shows poor performance under a claim that it is flawed. It is also irrelevant that it's been in your ToS since 2012: Precedent or longevity do not make consumer-unfriendly restrictions acceptable. This is implicitly recognized by allowing internal assessment: That assessment would be just as vulnerable to flawed methodology and therefore flawed decision making on products. If you were that concerned over such issues, you could issue further restrictions on performance assessment that limited such activity to be conducted only under Atlassian's close review or using your own mandated methodology. One reason you probably don't do that is because potential buyers would balk at those restrictions and either pass on your product or responsibly engage in due diligence and perform their own assessments regardless. Further, the resources to do extensive internal assessment may be lacking in many organizations, which means your provision to allow internal testing is meaningless to many customers. As a result, the prohibition against public disclosure thereby deprives them of any way of obtaining objective external analysis. You could satisfy your concerns by requiring that public disclosure be reviewed by Atlassian prior to publication. You could require an option for Atlassian to comment on the results with embedded notations without restricting publication itself. That would still be heavy handed but at least allow a reasonable amount of independent review of your performance.
- tzs 6y agoI have no idea if it applies in this case, but sometimes terms like this are there because competitors have them. You have product X, and your competitor Y publishes whitepapers and ads comparing their performance to yours, showing yours is terrible. You think they rigged the tests, and want to publish your own X vs. Y comparison but Y's TOS prohibits it. Once one major Y does this, many others follow suit as a defensive measure against Y. I seem to recall seeing some where X's TOS would try to limit the prohibition to just that situation, such as saying that you could only publish X vs. Y performance comparisons if either there were no restrictions on others publishing Y performance comparisons or Y granted X an exception to Y's prohibition.
- random3 6y agoIf you start using Linear you won't need a benchmark to notice the difference. This is what happens when the "clueless" start "innovating". I've had several conversations over the years with members of Atlassian technical teams. They always wanted to work on performance, but never allowed (priorities). They are in "good" company (Oracle, China, etc.). What's preventing anonymous performance benchmarks, though?
- guitarbill 6y agowhat do they work on? how many other features can you bolt onto an already mediocre wiki? or is it just bugfixes, keeping up with browser quirks, and useless UI "redesigns"/reskins?
- maccard 6y agoAs awful as confluence is, it's not really a mediocre wiki. It's the best I've used. (Out of confluence, notion, mediawiki and some god awful internal thing based on wordpress). It's interface sucks, the performance sucks, the editor sucks, search sucks, and it's still the best.
- guitarbill 6y agoPoint still stands, right?
- maccard 6y agoI don't think so. If it's mediocre, then it's mediocre compared to something else, but in reality it's best-in-class. It just turns out that the opposition isn't exactly bringing it's a game.
- guitarbill 6y agoso what do they work on?
- 6y ago
- dalrympm 6y agoI'm curious, I'm a Cloud customer and I can tell you that the service is incredibly slow even for a small scale setup (2 Jira Projects and 3 Confluence Workspaces). There's an insane amount of network requests seemingly for mouse tracking. By telling everyone here, that Atlassian Cloud products are insufferably slow, am I violating the ToS? I was actually thinking about doing a write up on the issues I've had but this seems to make me think I should do so AFTER I find someplace else to go. Right now GitHub is the likely destination but would love to hear other suggestions.
- SigKill9 6y agoIf you are looking for a fast alternative, we're building www.kitemaker.co (I'm one of the founders). We're part of the upcoming YC batch, and I'd be happy to help you onboard and import existing projects if needed.
- confluence_perf 6y agoSorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? (edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays) We're trying to focus on frustrating pages/experiences rather than number of network calls and such, because while the latter is correlated, the former (frustrating slow experiences) is really the bar and the higher priority. In terms of the ToS I'm not from legal so can't say (still looking into it), but have definitely had conversations with users on public forums about performance issues, and afaik no one has been accused of violating their ToS. (edit: since I can't reply due to HN limits I'll try to add some stuff in this edit) ------- @plorkyeran "target things that are easier to fix than those with highest impact" -> this is a good point and something we're trying to do. Engineers know the former (easier to fix) pretty readily, but identifying "highest impact" requires some work, so I'm (as a PM) always trying to find out. It's of course some combination of these two (low hanging fruit, high impact items) that forms the priority list. ------ @igetspam (moved followup into a reply to trigger notification) ------@core-questions "perf to take over company for 6mo-1yr" I'm not in the position to make that level of decisions, but can certainly pass the feedback up the chain. The perf team is trying their best though, so any info anyone can provide us can help us apply our resources in the right place
- floatingatoll 6y agoI’m enjoying the irony of willful TOS breaking here, but y’all probably shouldn’t be openly declaring yourselves as subject to enforcement actions under accounts with names attached to them, even if Atlassian’s own guidance (see elsethread) suggests they don’t care about your comments.
- jjuhl 6y ago"Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues" - Their ToS may prohibit it, but that is in no way going to stop me from doing it - I don't give a shit about some document they write. Atlassian products suck hard and their performance characteristics are horrible. I hate being forced to use their crap at work.
- Hamuko 6y agoThe problem with Atlassian's Terms of Service is that most of their end-users are not paying for the software and do not really care if they violate an agreement they were either forced to make or which someone made on their behalf.
- jjuhl 6y agoBe honest; noone cares about (or reads) ToS agreements.
- Hamuko 6y agoNo one cares to read any Terms of Service agreements, but I think Atlassian's products face another tier: not caring to adhere to them at all. I'd personally find it pretty funny to go up to my boss and tell them I can't read my Jira tickets because Atlassian banned my account. Or would they ban the entire organization instead? Either way, hilarious.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 6y agoThey will suddenly care when Atlassian locks them out of being able to access anything. Then, we'll see posts on Twitter or here or elsewhere about some user crying about not getting access to "their" stuff on a 3rd party's site.
- cronix 6y ago
- las3r 6y agoBoth cloud and on prem user here. Both systems are slow, hardware doesnt scale. Simply browsing issues easily takes 2 to 5 seconds per click. Confluences is okay i guess, just the slowness is annoying. That, and trying to to format text properly. When youve worked with azure devops or github before, atlassian tooling is really a blast from the past.
- uncledave 6y agoYep. I was a company official JIRA and Confluence on prem JVM restarter, mail queue unclogger and schema unfucker for 5 years. When they moved it to Cloud it was the best day of my life because it wasn’t my problem any more even though the performance was even worse.
- Simulacra 6y agoJira was a disaster for our team, but the response we got as a major government contractor from Atlassian was so bad that we swore off all Atlassian products. When I would bring performance issues to the technical support team it was like trying to convince Apple there was a problem with the butterfly keyboard. Like talking to a brick wall.
- ssddanbrown 6y agoI have not recently used confluence myself, but having created an open source project in the same space I have seen a few users migrate from confluence quoting speed as their main frustration & reason for migrating away. Has been the case for a couple of years so I'm surprised it has not been more of a focus for them.
- uncledave 6y agoAs a user without a contract I’d like to point out that the performance is universally shitty :)
- bionade24 6y agoJust running atlassian.com on Google Pagespeed shows why they're doing that: 12 from 100. That is really examplaric for other Atlassian products. And it's really not hard to go over 95 on GPagespeed, just don't use JS fucking everywhere.
- ec664 6y agoIMO their terrible performance is the #1 reason not to use their cloud services, and there's usually nothing you can do about it. The less resources they use for each customers the higher their margins.
- snvzz 6y agoWe've established Jira/Confluence/etc. are crap. Now, let's talk alternatives.
- rexelhoff 6y agoWhy is this not higher? Every atlassian thread should include a sticky "Go here for an alternative" post
- acdha 6y agoThis is not surprising: anyone who’s used Atlassian products knows that quality has been job number 97 for years. That doesn’t happen by accident – someone’s made the decision that they’ll make sales anyway and cut the QA budget. One of the most obvious examples: they have multiple WYSIWYG editor implementations which aren’t compatible. When you format something in Jira it’ll look fine in the preview and then render differently on reload. It’s been like that for years, nobody cares.
- redisman 6y agoThat doesn’t sound like a QA issue. Rather they have too many competing departments that are reimplementing the same things
- acdha 6y agoThat’s the cause. Normally that’d be caught in testing — the same input producing different outputs isn’t hard to test — and it’s commonly reported by users. Maybe they each think the other team should fix it but who cares: from the user’s perspective it’s broken.
- redisman 6y agoRight but as QA you can make a ticket but unless you assign it to someone who supervises all those departments it’ll just get closed as “works as expected from where I’m sitting at department A”
- meibo 6y agoThis is even worse than the crazy slowness. I spend 10 minutes to make a detailed bug report, just to have it fall apart after submitting. How does that happen in a software made to show bug reports? Just use standard markdown instead of your own bullcrap formatting that doesn't ever seem to work.
- confluence_perf 6y agoBest I can say here (as a Confluence PM not a Jira one, and in a public forum) is that customers are not the only ones that experience this pain, and the appropriate folks are notified on a regular basis. I think the genesis of this is historically many different editable fields might had different modules behind them (not every single one a different one, but maybe a handful of common ones). It looks like for whatever reason we (Atlassian) haven't fully migrated all of them to the newest common editor modules -> I don't know anything for sure though
- koreanguy 6y agoAtlassian Cloud is extremely slow, do not use it
- lexicality 6y agoI'm more concerned about 3.3(c) "[you will not] use the Cloud Products for the benefit of any third party". Surely if I'm tracking bugs in Jira, that is to the benefit of my users? What if I am using post-it notes to keep track of a client's request and they demand I use Jira instead because I keep losing the notes. It's extremely to their benefit that I use the cloud services...
- dekhn 6y agoThe obvious way to deal with this is to write a passive github repo that contains a performance test harness and test plugins that run against Atlassian servers. Make it trivial for any customer to download and use (I'm going to guess that Atlassian has some license terms about API use that could make this tricky). Simultaneously, tweet results from anonymous twitter, post to hacker news, get picked up in the trade press, make it big enough that it's embarassing for atlassian when a bunch of customers measure latency and realize the product is crap.
- jiggawatts 6y agoI've had similar ideas for shedding some much-need light on other similar performance pain points that large corporations are sweeping under the rug via legal means.
- x87678r 6y agoI thought Jira was slow then our team started using Service Now. Holy that is junk.
- Macha 6y agoService Now has an incredibly clunky UI in terms of actually finding what you want, but at least in our JIRA Datacenter vs Service Now (it's under a service now domain, so I assume some sort of cloud setup) setups with several hundred thousand issues in each, Service Now is actually pretty fast in the sense of "You click an action and it does it's intended purpose", where JIRA falls down. It's slow only in the "You need 5 actions to get to the thing you want" sense.
- pldr1234 6y agoInterestingly, ServiceNow is twice the market cap of Atlassian.
- Quarrel 6y agoFrom a Tableau terms of service: https://www.tableau.com/tlc-terms https://www.tableau.com/tlc-terms 3(g): "publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Tableau Beta Products." 3(f) is also identical, but they otherwise don't look that similar. They're both > $50B companies, so you'd think they could get their lawyers to use different verbage..
- cosmotic 6y agoMost if not all users of these applications aren't even in the position to review or accept the terms. When I was subjected to the terms dialog, I asked our legal department what I should do since obviously I am not an agent of the company. They said 'just click accept'. Unbelievable.
- mostlyghostly 6y agoSimple English Translation: We cannot trust any publicly posted claims about product performance, since they have effectively been cherry-picked by the marketing / legal team. Bad claims can be take down, thus the only remaining claims are good ones. Cool - can anyone provide a quick list of alternatives?
- tyingq 6y agoSomeone went to the trouble of making a semi-functional mockup to demonstrate to Atlassian that the product didn't need to be as big and slow: https://jira.ivorreic.com/ https://jira.ivorreic.com/
- sidlls 6y agoI have yet to use a JIRA or Confluence system that isn't almost insufferably slow while also suffering from a terrible UX. They seem to be the IBM of project management and documentation in the software world, though. Also for users not acting in the capacity of a representative for their employers who purchase or install JIRA/Confluence it is perfectly fine to discuss performance issues such as the above. The law isn't as dumb as some seem to think.
- thewebcount 6y agoI don't want to sound mean, but before discussing performance issues, can we talk about how completely unusable all of Atlassian's products are? I mean this sincerely. I feel bad saying it because I know there are lots of people probably on this site that worked on them. But I literally often have no idea how to proceed when using these products. That's something that hasn't happened to me since before I was a teenager. As 2 random examples, I've used both Confluence and Crucible in the last month. In Confluence, when I log in I see everything that anyone in my (1,000+ people) organization worked on most recently. People I've never even heard of show up as having edited some random document that doesn't concern me. Meanwhile, I can find no way to list all articles that I created. There's a small list of things I edited or looked at in the last 30 days, but no way to say, "just show me everything I created." Meanwhile, in Crucible, I literally can't figure out how to do anything. I'm reading through the changes to some source code and adding comments, and after an hour of doing that, it still says I've completed 0% of my review. WTF? And when I start my own code review, every god damned time, it tells me, "You're about to start a review with no reviewers." It then offers me 2 choices: Abandon the review or cancel. I get what "abandon" does. What does cancel do? Cancel the review? Cancel abandoning the review? Why is there no button right there to add reviewers? That's what I most want to do! (And there are no reviewers yet because it literally has not yet given me the option to add them previously in the work flow. WTF?) You can talk about performance all you want. I won't bother until the products actually perform some useful function. As of now, as far as I can tell, they don't.
- NickNameNick 6y agoAs much as I don't want to defend confluence here, or anywhere... The front page of your confluence instance's default space was configured by someone to show the all-activity feed. You should be able to go in to your profile, and set your default space to a more specific and useful 'space', maybe your teams space. While you're looking at your profile, you should also see a more tailored activity feed. I can't help you with crucible.
- nate_770 6y agoI read HN every day, I never post, I signed up for an account just to post this. I'm a senior PM at a large e-comm company, I was EXTREMELY frustrated with the horrible performance of Jira Cloud, I submitted support tickets to no avail. It's obviously an over-architected broken system. I moved my team to clubhouse, even-though it created an element of fragmentation considering all other teams are using JIRA. I'm so happy though with clubhouse, I can actually get my work done without mindlessly waiting for every interaction. Icing on the cake: I was considering moving the company over to Jira on a self hosted AWS instance, I've read that it can be a little faster. but.. they're discontinuing the self hosted option. Nail in the coffin for me. Good bloody riddance.
- Benlights 6y agoHeya Nate I thought it was you when I read the comment just has to look at the username.
- pas 6y agoI've tried to convince a particular manager to try GitLab Issues. (We already use GitLab for git/CI anyway). Seeing that I'm not just the one who thinks it's so ridiculously frustratingly bad-slow [as in, it's impossible to be this slow even after multiple rewrites unless it's some kind of bizarre experiment by Douglas Adams' ghost] will likely lead to us dropping JIRA for good. Thanks!