Automated stale‑page review workflow for Confluence

[cameron comeau]

Confluence pages accumulate over time, and many become outdated without any clear signal to owners. I’d love to see a built‑in lifecycle feature where:

• If a page has not been viewed or modified in X months
• Confluence automatically emails the last modifier or designated owner
• Asking whether the page is still current
• With options to:

• confirm it’s still valid
• mark it as deprecated
• archive it
• or delete it

[Mikael Sandberg]

Since it has been announced that data center is being sunsetted I would not expect this would come to fruition. Confluence Cloud can do this via automation, it has a branch for inactive pages that can be used to do this.

[cameron comeau]

Our current Atlassian Confluence version is 9.2.8, so it looks like we are using data center. I have reached out to my IT department to confirm this and to get the ball rolling on whether or not they plan to move to the cloud.

[Brandi Guess]

the problem with the "viewed of modified" is that if its been viewed it is excluded. but that means people may be looking at incorrect, outdated information. Those people may not even know it. 

What you need is for pages to be reviewed on a schedule that works for you. that is already something you can set up with automation. 

you can have bulk emails sent to users of all pages that have not been updated in x amount of time. You can also have it create work items for pages that have not been updated, and have a board to work off of. 

[cameron comeau]

Yes, viewed is perhaps not the best answer. But I'm not sure time since last modification is the best answer either. A page may simply not need to be modified that often - such as one that shows a building layout - but is looked at constantly. It would depend on use case and so it would be nice if that were a setting that could be set by space. An HR or facilities type space may opt for a time since last viewing whereas a software documentation space may opt for a time since last modification.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

This isn't a native Confluence feature today, and it is rather unlikely that Atlassian will develop it for Data Center (which will reach the EOL in ~3 years). Atlassian declared multiple times that they will focus on scalability and security, and make sure that it is easy to migrate your Confluence spaces to cloud.

Nevertheless it's a common need, and our Better Content Archiving for Confluence app has been the go-to solution for the use case for 10+ years. It offers exactly the workflow you described: staleness detection based on views and edits, automated email notifications to owners, and one-click options to confirm, archive, or delete (documentation).

Make sure you give it a try.

(Discl. this paid and supported app is developed by our team. Free for 10 users.)