For the RIFE project, we've been using Confluence for a bit more than a year. Initially, everything was fine and dandy, even though it ran a bit slowly.

They improved performance, but about three months ago the 'professional' wiki started to become unusable. Basically without giving editorial access to anonymous users, nobody is able to edit pages or to comment on them. Which means that either we leave the wiki open for any spam and abuse, or we make it impossible for people to contribute. Sadly, we have to go for the last solution, since hours after anonymous has the rights to post comments and edit pages, spam starts to appear throughout the whole wiki. It's not feasible to manually track this and delete everything.

This issue has been reported by four different users and has been tracked for months in their issue tracker. I did everything I could possibly do to help them trace the problem:

• posted screenshots of every related screen
• gave them a copy of a full XML export of the wiki
• erased our database, reinstalled confluence, restored content from a backup, still the same problem
• looked over the log files but couldn't see anything reported besides database DDL actions

Last week, Atlassian decided to close the issue as Cannot Reproduce, even though I'm 100% sure I can reproduce it every single time on our systems, as can three other users. To quote them: "Unfortunately, with no logs (indicating to us where the problem is located) or any steps to reproduce the problem here, we can't fix it.".

So since I am personally unable to give them usable log files because they just don't contain any statements, they close the issue unless their users are somehow magically able to make Confluence spit out useful logs or figure out a way for them to reproduce it on their systems.

Never before have I regretted more to have adopted a closed-source solution even though we got it for no pay. We're now effectively locked into the vendor and can't fix the problem since they won't and we don't have access to the required resources.

The only possible paths left for us now are to remove Confluence, install an open-source wiki, and manually convert everything; or write our own competing open-source wiki.

We're going to do both and start work on an open-source RIFE wiki. In the end everybody will benefit.

Update: after posting this Atlassian commented on the Jira issue with a solution that finally proved to be working. I already started moving to XWiki though and I'll continue to see if it can be used instead.