Projects not fully created during onboarding.

[rodolfoBee]

Environment

SaaS (https://sentry.io/)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open Sentry issues feed page while having access to any project (New organisation, just joined, not member of a team...).
2. Click on "Create project"
3. Choose a platform and name
4. Click "create project"
5. Go back using the browser back button or "Back to platform selection"

Expected Result

The UI shows a confirmation in the UI saying "Created Project [NAME]", which makes the user believe that the project is fully created.

The user follows the UI to configure the SDK and clicks back to platform selection to create a new project, or simply go back to create a second project.

The expectation here is that the project is created in Sentry.

Actual Result

When going back, Sentry silently deletes the project with message "Removed project new-pro in getting_started" and attributes the action to the user, see screenshot:

This creates a negative UX as the UI shows the project is created but no signs that the same project was automatically deleted.

Product Area

Projects - Project Creation

Link

No response

DSN

No response

Version

No response

[linear]

ENG-6909

[getsantry]

Assigning to @getsentry/support for routing ⏲️

[getsantry]

Routing to @getsentry/product-owners-projects-project-creation for triage ⏲️

[priscilawebdev]

Hi @rodolfoBee, thank you for reporting this.

This is actually expected behavior, not a bug. We intentionally implemented a mechanism that silently deletes the project when the user navigates back in the flow ... whether using the browser’s native back button or the in-app back button. Some related PRs: #4473, #50062, #87156 , #88532 .

The reasoning behind this is that, in most cases, navigating back at that step indicates the user selected the wrong platform and wants to choose a different one. Previously, this led to many empty or abandoned projects being created. The current behavior was introduced to prevent that.

We initially displayed a confirmation modal before deleting the project, but later decided to remove it because it could be confusing for users (see #49844).

I do agree that we could improve this by showing an indicator such as “Deleted project [NAME]” when the user navigates back in the flow. We could also add a flag in the audit log clarifying that the project was not explicitly deleted by the user.

I believe that would provide better transparency. What do you think?