🎄 Advent Calendar Day 2: “Last updated 3+ years ago”: Welcome to the Dark Side of Confluence

[#1]

There’s a very special place in every Confluence space.
You find it by applying the most powerful filter of all:

Last updated: 3+ years ago

That’s where the darkness dwells. 🕯️
Old release notes. Orphaned how-tos. Specs for a feature that died three product managers ago. Pages that silently whisper, “Please don’t trust me.”

And yet… people still find them.

Why these ancient pages are a problem (even if nobody admits it)

At first glance, outdated pages look harmless. They’re not shouting, they’re not breaking anything, they’re just… there.

But they slowly create problems:

• Confusion: Someone searches “Onboarding process” and gets three conflicting pages. Which one is real? 🤷
• Broken trust: If one page is outdated, people start doubting all documentation.
• Wasted time: Teams ping each other to confirm things that “should be in Confluence somewhere.”
• Zombie processes: Old procedures that should be dead still influence decisions “because it’s written in the doc.”

Your Confluence isn’t just a wiki. It’s part of how your team thinks. When it’s full of ghosts, people stop believing in it.

Step 1: Turn on the lights 🔦

Start with the scary filter:

Updated: more than 3 years ago
Bonus level of horror: “Updated: more than 5 years ago.”

Look at those pages and ask three simple questions:

1. Is this still true?
2. Does anyone still need it?
3. Would a new teammate be harmed by reading this? 😅

If the answer to #3 is even a weak “uhh… maybe,” that page needs attention.

Step 2: Give pages a second life (or a decent funeral)

Not every old page deserves deletion. Some just need a bit of love.

You can:

• Archive with dignity
  Move outdated content to an Archive space or section and clearly label it:
  “⚠️ Archived: Information below may be outdated. Use for historical reference only.”
• Update & relabel
  If the content is still useful, refresh it and add:
  
  
  • An owner
  • A “Last reviewed” date
  • A label like current, deprecated, or draft
    
    
• Merge duplicates
  Combine multiple similar pages into one “source of truth” and redirect people there.
• Delete the real trash
  Old drafts, test pages, and “tmp-123” experiments? Let them go. Your future self will thank you.

Step 3: Make “stale page hunting” a habit 🧹

One cleanup campaign is great. A system is better.

Consider:

• Regular review cycles
  Once a quarter, each team filters pages by last updated date and reviews their own area.
• Page owners
  Every important page has a real person behind it, not just “Team X.” That owner gets a reminder to review it.
• Simple rules
  For example:
  
  
  • Operational docs: reviewed every 6–12 months
  • Policies: reviewed annually
  • Project docs: archived when the project is over
    
    
• Visible badges
  Use labels or small notes like:
  “✅ Last reviewed: Oct 2025”
  “⚠️ Might be outdated – check with the XYZ team”

Small signals like that make a huge difference in how much people trust what they read.

Step 4: Turn it into a team joke, not a blame game 😈

This doesn’t have to be a witch-hunt for “who wrote this in 2018?”
Make it fun instead:

• Run a “Haunted Page Hunt” – who finds the oldest page this week?
• Share the most ridiculous outdated snippet in a chat channel (with kindness).
• Celebrate the biggest cleanups like mini achievements.

The goal isn’t to shame anyone. It’s to make sure your knowledge base is useful today, not just historically interesting.

✨ See You Beyond the Filter

Your Confluence deserves better than quietly rotting in the dark. That “Last updated 3+ years ago” filter isn’t just a horror show – it’s a treasure map showing exactly where trust is leaking out of your documentation.

So grab a flashlight, a cup of coffee, and maybe a brave teammate. It’s time to tour the darkest corners of your Confluence and either bring those pages back into the light — or gently lay them to rest. ⚰️✨

See you in the next cleanup session — and don’t forget to bring your most cursed “we still had THAT in our wiki?!” stories and best cleanup tips. I’ll bring the filters. 😉

[Sean Sweeney]

Thanks @Iryna Komarnitska_SaaSJet_. This is a great idea - we really need to start doing this. Now that our site has been around for a while I'm noticing more and more outdated content.

Is there a shortcut for this filter that I'm missing? I see Past year and Custom but nothing in between. I used Custom with a starting date before we joined and an end date of three years ago, but the UX for this is really clunky and the end date will have to be edited every time. It would be great to just have a Last updated: 3+ years ago link that always works. Maybe there are URL parameter that aren't in the UX?

[Rinjini Poddar]

This is so true! I’ve seen so many teams say, ‘We need to create a new page for this,’ only to later realize we already had one — we just never bothered to update it.

[Christine Green]

@Iryna Komarnitska_SaaSJet_  It is frustrating to read this article, then go look for that filter, and find that it is not available unless you put in the specific dates as Sean Sweeney mentions above. If you are going to create an article like this, please base it on the actual interface. Thank you.

[Iryna Komarnitska_SaaSJet_]

Hi @Sean Sweeney , @Christine Green 

Thank you so much for your feedback and for pointing this out — and I’m sorry for the confusion.

The phrase “Last updated 3+ years ago” was meant as a figure of speech. If it were actually possible to create such a precise filter, I would definitely have shown that in the article. My goal was just to exaggerate how old some updates and page views in Confluence spaces can be.

In practice, it doesn’t really matter whether a page was updated six months ago, a year ago, or two years ago — the problem is that it’s outdated or duplicated, and our Confluence spaces start to feel like an old, cluttered attic.

For example, in Space Analytics I filter pages by their last update date, and if I see a page that hasn’t been updated for more than six months, that’s already a very alarming sign for me.

[Iryna Komarnitska_SaaSJet_]

Hi @Rinjini Poddar ,

Oh yes, I really feel this too. I recently had to go through old product documentation, and it was incredibly hard — tons of pages, duplicates, and outdated information everywhere.

That’s why I believe it’s so important to build a real “culture of maintaining Confluence spaces” in companies.

When everything is stored in the cloud, it’s easy to assume things are “clean and organized.” But imagine if all of that content were printed out on paper and spread across the entire office — we’d immediately see the mess and want to fix it!

[Christine Green]

@Iryna Komarnitska_SaaSJet_ In my company, we have documentation that may be quite old but still used and does not need updating. This may not be typical but it's true for us and makes it more challenging to clean up content. Even so, it would be helpful to have some precise canned filters such as the one you mentioned. Thanks! 

[Darin - Opus Guard]

Such a great write-up, the “ghost pages” problem is real 👻 We see teams use tools like Content Retention Manager for Confluence to inexpensively audit old pages, classify what’s worth keeping vs. archiving, and bring trust back to their spaces. Deleting isn’t enough; knowing what to keep or flag as historical matters just as much.

It's all about keeping only what you need and allowing people to classify what should be kept as an indicator of it's value. Removing the outdated content really helps save teams time and stress.