I was recently debugging something in my Confluence install when I discovered this interesting bit:
Now, why might my Confluence server have a favorite color and favorite character? (Also, who’s Rose?)
I did some Googling and I couldn’t find very much information on it. Some people online said it’s a way to obfuscate the Confluence version to prevent attacks (which doesn’t make much sense, considering the Confluence version is by default in the source code of every page) or some kind of clandestine analytics (which I suppose could make sense). The only bit I could find was a reference to the favorite color and favorite character (known as the “Codename”) on Atlassian’s developer site:
Mystery solved! Though I don’t really know why they use this internally instead of just using the version number, it is evidently some kind of version indicator, as both the favorite character and favorite color change for every minor version, at least until 7.15.1. Very cool.