Shared Links Blueprint unusable - requires whitelisting!?!
Asked by Henning van Ackeren:

The documentation of the feature promises:

"The Shared Links blueprint helps you take content from the web and share it with your team. You can use Shared Links to share and collaborate on web content, or to create a centralized repository of useful links."

Since a recent update it also says:

"To prevent people from accidentally or maliciously sharing links that may pose a security risk to your site, domains must be added to the whitelist, before they can be shared using the share a link blueprint."

And: "We strongly recommend **not** disabling the whitelist. "

We have used the feature for years and now the whitelist requirement makes the feature practically unusable.

Is every user who wants to share a website link expected ask an admin to add the domain to the whitelist, before?!?

I hope I misunderstand something - can somebody enlighten me, please?


Answers:
author: Shannon S
body: Hello Henning,

Thank you for contacting us about this. This was an update to the [Shared Links Blueprint](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/shared-links-blueprint-407724258.html) as of [Confluence 6.15 release](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-6-15-upgrade-notes-965554124.html).

The intention is that your colleagues will only share pages from trusted sites, but I realize that for many, this is not a security concern and the whitelist is hindering your process.

I found that this concern has been brought up in the following feature request:

* [CONFSERVER-58337](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-58337) *can you separate whitelist for Shared link in confluence?*

The sentiment is the same as yours; that it's making the blueprint unusable for many. Thank you so much for your feedback and I would recommend following that case to be updated on this if anything changes regarding that in the future.

Regards,

Shannon

comments: author: Henning van Ackeren
body: Thanks a lot for the information, Shannon.

My personal take:

This feature update will annoy admins that would need to check and add lots of domains.

This feature update will annoy users because that can't use it anymore.

And most important: this feature will definitely not stop users sharing the links they want to share! Obviously you can share every link on any Confluence page without a whitelist being considered. I can't understand the reasoning at all, it just takes away a convenient feature, and does not increase security in any way, unless you want to encourage people to share less links generally.


author: Shannon S
body: Henning,

Indeed, I can see how that would be annoying to have to do every time.

Hopefully now that we're talking about this on Community it will get more people talking about it on the feature request, and increase the votes.

Take care, and have a pleasant week.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Amit Girme
body: **Lol**

I must say you are very innocent

Do you really think talking on the community will help to pace it?  

For a year or so, it's like daily I am adding one or two domains for our sales or other teams and god knows how long I will keep adding.


author: Shannon S
body: Hello [@Amit Girme](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2020237),

Thank you for your reply. I understand how your past experiences can make it seem like your feedback isn't being considered, but please know that our development teams do consider customer input when choosing which features to implement. If you'd like to know more, you can read about this on our [Implementation of New Features Policy](https://confluence.atlassian.com/support/implementation-of-new-features-policy-201294576.html).

In addition, since Community is a public forum, whenever a specific bug or feature request is shared here, its public awareness increases. In turn, more people will begin voting on the request, thus increasing visibility within our development teams.

In the above document, under ***How we choose what to implement**,* one of the many factors we consider is Customer feedback. This includes questions and posts on Atlassian Community. We also take into account any comments and votes on issues found on [jira.atlassian.com.](https://jira.atlassian.com) Of course, other factors are considered when choosing what to implement, including the overall product strategy, but discussing it here and voting on requests certainly does help.

I hope that clarifies things for you, but do let us know if you have any further concerns.

Take care,

Shannon


author: malcook
body: If talking about it on Community helps it gain traction, I've got a lot of *lorem ipsum* for you...


Tags: confluence-server