We've recently started using Confluence (4.2.1 - ten user $10 downloaded edition) and have imported our users and groups from our Jira installation (Jira 5.0.2 - the basic $10 ten user install and we're just using the built-in Jira Internal Directory - no LDAP or other external user/auth mechs).
In Confluence all users are members of the confluence-users group:
Whenever anyone adds a new Space to Confluence it's never visible to everyone despite the Space Permissions saying that anyone in the confluence-users group has the correct permissions, for example, here's a Space created by my colleague Andy:
In the space above, the confluence-users group has View, Add, Export etc permissions yet when I logon to Confluence I can't find the Space in the Spaces directory.
If I try to browse to it directly I get a 404 page not found.
The only way for Andy to make this space visible to other users is to explicitly add individual users in the Space Admin -> Permissions page.
As a workaround (so we don't have to add 6 individual users each time) we've created a new group called all-users and added all of our Confluence users to that group. Whenever we create a new Space we have to remember to explicitly add the all-users group to a space's permissions.
This is a bit of a pain and we just want all Spaces we create to be visible to all authenticated users by default.
I would also add that all of our users are also members of the confluence-administrators group as well.
Why won't Confluence do this?
This is not the same issue as which appears to be a LDAP group name typo problem:
https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/19365/user-s-can-t-see-global-spaces-in-confluence
