Confluence - hide comments, ellipsis and breadcrumbs on pages from unlicensed users

Question

Jira Service Desk gives the ability to link to a KB area in Confluence. Our KB articles require authentication in order to view them, anonymous access cannot be given as we cannot have our competitors seeing these articles. In this scenario we are setting up Confluence so there is no global anonymous access and the Unlicensed Access is enabled, in JSD that means the "All active users and customers can access the KB without a Confluence license" option is selected. With this setup the first time a customer selects a KB article from the search results they are prompted to login to Confluence, using the same login as JSD they are able to do that, although inconvenient we are fine with this. At this point the customer sees the Confluence page but can also see our comments, the ellipsis which gives options like Page History, Page Information, Resolved Comments .... and there is a Dashboard breadcrumb at the top of the page. We are looking to hide/disable these options so the customer ONLY sees the content of the page. Can anyone recommend how to accomplish this with NO plugins? Here are things that I have found but do not provide a full solution. Javascript that can to in the Custom HTML area that will check if the user is anonymous and if so hide these areas, as our customers have to login they are simply unlicensed not anonymous, I haven't found any javascript that can test for unlicensed users or users not in any groups In the space's Look and Feel > Stylesheet area we can add the following to hide these areas, but that impacts our staff who create the documents who will need to use comments and inline comments, page history etc. #action-menu-link { display:none !important; } #breadcrumbs { display:none !important; } #comments-section { display:none !important; }

Drew Smith_xzkuvh · Answer

An update on this for anyone who may be interested. There were still elements appearing that we didn't want the customer to see, namely * inline comments * the "Created by <> last modified...." * The Space Tools menu The following code is the same as above but with the additional lines added to hide these elements. As for the "Likes" area, the following can be put on the Space > Look and Feel > Stylesheet section if really needed to be hidden but this does hide it from licensed and unlicensed users. #likes-section { display:none !important; }

Drew Smith_xzkuvh · Answer

@Stephen Sifers , although I appreciate your input I didn't implement your advice. You had the section for the comments but we also want to hide the ellipsis, breadcrumbs, labels and page like areas. I tried doing your little code snippet in the Content Layouts -> Page Layout area for the ellipsis but it still showed. I wasn't going to play around with the code in the page layout area. When I was trying your original code block from yesterday I was doing some research trying to get it to work and found one post that mentioned using the browser's dev tools to find the different parameters/options for AJS.params. I did that this morning and found the boolean remoteUserHasLicensedAccess. I implemented that in my initial code and it worked like a charm. I have put the code at the bottom of this reply into the Custom HTML section "At the end of the HEAD" and everything except for the " Likes this" is now removed for the unlicensed users but there for our staff. We will just tell our staff not to like any of our KB articles and that should take care of the "Likes" text. Probably the only downside to this is when we upgrade Confluence this may have to be replaced, we'll just make a note that this has to be added as part of our upgrade procedure.

Stephen Sifers · Answer

Hello Drew, Thank you for testing out the provided information. I went back through and retested this and found it didn’t work on a fresh instance. I had an issue in my testing instance with some residual from the previous testing. I did create a fresh instance with 6.12 and found another method that may work for you. This method uses the global comment layout. Under Confluence Administration > Look and Feel > Layouts > Comments Layout Enter the following under the first 3 lines: #if ($userAccessor.hasMembership('unlicensed', $helper.action.remoteUser.name))

#elseif ($helper.action.remoteUser.name == '')

#else And add the following at the end of the editor: #end Here are screenshots of where this should be inserted: Start of file: End of file: The above will hide comments from users within the group named “Unlicensed” or users who are not logged in. I used the following documentation as reference How to display different appearance for different users using Confluence layouts. I am also going to correct my response above to remove the incorrect code block that will not work. Please test the above and let us know the outcome. Regards, Stephen Sifers