What is the best way to check permissions on a particular page?

Question

I frequently have people coming to me because they don't have permissions to page x in a space that I am an admin for, and sometimes I don't have permissions to view it either (because usually if someone doesn't have permissions, and they're supposed to, the page creator has set permissions in some screwy fashion.) In order to find the page and check the permissions, I have to go through the Space Tools > Restricted Pages and basically just scan or ctrl-f until I find it - which is massively obnoxious. Pretty much every page in our wiki has some kind of restriction on it and we have hundreds of pages.

If I have administrator permissions (and therefore could give myself permissions to view  + edit the page, should I find said page) then why can't I, say, log in with administrator privileges and then suddenly see everything on the page anyway?

Since that doesn't seem to be an option, is there some way to sort the results on the "restricted pages" page or any other easier way than just slogging through over 20 pages of wiki page list until I find the right one?

this is horrible and takes way too long.

Amber Loranger · Answer

Thank you Rob - I may see if we can get some kind of add on (I do not have the power to purchase such a thing myself.) However I must reiterate... with my existing admin privileges I can already give myself permission to see and edit literally anything in the space , I just have to go around the back way and it takes a long item and is super user unfriendly, so there would be literally no data available to me that is not available to me now so your reason doesn't really make sense.

Rob Woodgate · Answer

Hi Amber,

The reason you can't log in as an administrator and automatically see everything on every page is because that would be a breach of trust, and potentially a breach of data protection laws, depending on your location.  If Atlassian provided that functionality then many organisations wouldn't use Confluence because it wouldn't provide that basic level of data protection and security compliance.

Having said that, I totally get why this is frustrating for you.

Unfortunately there is no way in Confluence to easily find the information on restrictions on a single page without wading through all of the pages of the list.  What makes it more frustrating is that you can't have the list on a single page, because at least that way you could CTRL+F.  It would help a great deal if Atlassian added a link from the Restrictions popup to the admin area for that page, so an admin could immediate jump to a place where they can amend the page restrictions.....

You might find an add-on like Ultimate Permissions Manager or Space Admin useful because they provide additional functionality to make managing page permissions quicker and easier.  Neither is not free but the pricing is reasonable (more so for the Ultimate Permissions Manager).  There are plenty of other permissions add-ons that might help in the Atlassian Marketplace.  Hopefully you can find one that works for you.