Is this a bug?

[Wendy Emerman]

From Atlassian documentation, the definition of Site-Admin is this:

Site-admins are the users who manage a site. The following permissions are currently available to site-admins:

• All permissions assigned to the 'administrators' group for the product(s) you have

As an administrator (user is only a member of this group), the page-watch icon of any page has a "manage watchers" function.

As a site-admin (user is only a member of this group) the "manage watchers" function is not available on any page.

Is this a bug?

If this is a bug, is there any way to check for other functions that are mis-assigned?

[Wendy Emerman · Accepted solution]

Thank you so much @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- and @Scott Theus.  Your thoughtful answers led me to my answer.  The "Administrators" group has "Admin" permission in the space I was accessing.  The "Site-Admins" group is not even assigned to the space, so, in essence, I was just a Confluence-user.

So, the Atlassian documentation should definitely make this more clear!  For anyone reading this, here are my tips:

1. Space permission (checks) must be set, per space, for administrator and site-admin groups.  In particular the admin permission!
2. It's very unintuitive that the add/delete restrictions permission is separate from the admin permission.
3. It's very unintuitive that users with space admin permission are restricted from restricted pages, and must be granted permission, per restricted page.
4. Under Global Permissions, the "system-administrators" user group is reserved for use by Atlassian support staff to provide support and maintenance tasks. You can't edit these groups or add users to them.

[Scott Theus · Accepted solution]

Hi @Wendy Emerman,

No, I don't think this is a bug....but the documentation is misleading. There is a distinction between the site administrator and the space administrator. While the site admin has the ability to manage the overall site (user setup, billing, etc.) the space administrator controls the restrictions within the space. The site admin does not automatically have access to every thing across the board, that user would also need to to be part of the administrator group for the space. 

There is a lengthy discussion on something similar here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Why-would-a-full-admin-in-confluence-be-unable-to-see-a-page-due/qaq-p/332529

Of course, I could be misinterpreting the documentation.  @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, what do you think?

-Scott

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm with you @Scott Theus - the doc kind of says it, but in a very unclear way.  If I were a new admin, I'd struggle to extract that info.