"New project" not displayed even if creation is possible

Summary for users

If you have a group and can't find how to create a project, just go to your group.

The "New project" button will be visible if you have at least Developer rights on the group. Make sure then to create the project in the group, not in a user namespace.

Details

For users that have reached their limit of project creation (which is 0 for "external users") and have at least Devloper rights in some group, the current state is inconsistent: GitLab won't display the "New project" button nor the option in the "+" dropdown menu unless they are viewing the group. In the context of the group, these are displayed and the creation succeeds.

One could argue that a user with a limit of 0 should not be able to create any project, but some prominent instances actually rely on this: they set all users to external by default to prevent project creation in personal namespaces. This is notably the case of the present one, but also of heptapod.host, for different reasons.

In the long term, it would probably be better to have a setting to disable personal namespaces without setting the users to external. For now, this is a major UX inconsistency bug.

• if the current user actually can create a project, then the option should always been displayed.
• if the user cannot create a project in the personal namespace, the latter should not be an option in the blank project creation page
• if the current user can create a project, but not in the personal namespace, then the default namespace in the project creation page should be a suitable group
• similar defaults and options for the Bitbucket import page