After 11 years, Atlassian customers finally get custom domains ... they don't want

Oz upstart promised jira.domain.com, now offers something.jira.domain.com

Atlassian customers' eleven-year quest for custom domains continues, with the Australian upstart's proposed solution failing to satisfy.

As The Register reported in 2022, Atlassian floated the idea of custom domains for its custom apps in 2011. Yes, 2011.

The ticket for the change is called "CLOUD 6999" and has become infamous for the length of time it has remained unresolved. An unidentified wag has even made t-shirts bearing the CLOUD 6999 name.

Atlassian promised last year to sort it out some time in 2023, and in February posted an update on its initial designs.

It hasn't gone down well. Atlassian's proposed solution requires "a company-branded domain name, a list of options for the 1st-level subdomain keyword, and a 2nd-level subdomain at your own choice."

Atlassian cloud admin experience chap Luke Liu explained that structure as delivering URLs such as internal.support.acme.com or people.knowledge.acme.org.

One of Atlassian's stated company values is "Don't #@!% the customer." But plenty of Atlassian customers feel well and truly #@!%ed by the custom domain plan.

"The cloud roadmap specifically uses an example of 1 level," wrote one commenter on the 1,445-item thread discussing CLOUD 6999. "The team managing this seems to be completely lost and disconnected from the user base."

"People want to be able to have a custom URL of https://mysubdomain.mycompany.com/ where mysubdomain is a custom subdomain that could be anything and mycompany.com is my company's domain name," wrote another, adding "That is the sole requirement to this issue which is almost 12 years old, has over 1400 comments, 7700+ likes and 2500+ votes. So I'm really glad that you've spared the time to share your initial designs to the problem stated above."

"Forcing two levels of subdomain (with one of those being selected from a predefined list) doesn't make sense to me," wrote another commenter, who pointed out it is "inconsistent with pretty much every other cloud service I've used."

"If we're limited to a series of predefined 'subdomain keywords' that is by no means a 'custom domain'," wrote another.

Others are voting with their feet.

"We have decided to migrate from Jira. Good luck, Atlassian!" one customer posted in March.

"Are Atlassian executives aware that this issue is doing serious and lasting damage to their reputation?" asked another?

Perhaps not: they're currently busy "rebalancing" the company by letting go of 500 people.

Do you know of a feature request older than CLOUD 6999, or Atlassian's 16-year-old issue that prevents changing the named author of Confluence documents? If so, feel free to send me an email so we can highlight more instances of – ahem – excellent and responsive customer service from the software industry. ®

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