Confluence automation to archive inactive spaces

Question

Hi everyone. I took on the "simple" task to write a Confluence Automation Flow that would archive inactive spaces. Since there is no configuration setting to turn off the auto-creation of a personal space whenever you join Confluence, it has resulted in thousands of personal sites that have never been used.

Sounds like a nobel idea to cleanup the unused spaces by deleting or archiving them, right? I know the conditions to check for:

trigger = scheduled

Branch Flow / Related Entities using CQL space.type = personal

AND {{page.count}} = 0

AND ( Last activity date is empty OR Last activity date is more than 180 days ago)

Then archive the space.

The issue I ran into is Confluence CQL does not appear to have a way to check the last activity date on a space. The space object seems to be somewhat limited.

This should be simple, until it's not. In Jira, this would take 20 seconds. Anyone had any success with attempting a Flow like this or something similar?

I truely appreaciate your input. Thanks.

Martin Runge · Accepted Answer

Hi @Don Hames

The core issue is that CQL indexes content, not containers, so a space has no "last activity" field to query, and an empty space has no content rows to match. I would skip CQL and use a Send web request in the flow against the v2 API: page through /wiki/api/v2/spaces?type=personal, then for each space hit /wiki/api/v2/spaces/{id}/pages?limit=1&sort=-modified-date to get both the emptiness check and the last modified date in one call, and archive from there.

I have experienced that personal spaces sometimes get recreated the moment the user visits their profile again.

Cheers, Martin

Pratibha Kumari · Accepted Answer

I think the challenge here is that Confluence Automation and CQL expose much less space-level metadata than Jira does. Your logic makes sense, but without a reliable “last activity” field on the space entity, the 180-day condition becomes difficult to evaluate directly.

One possible approach might be to derive inactivity from the content level—such as checking for recently created or updated pages/blog posts—rather than relying on a space-level last activity date. You could then combine that with the personal-space and zero-page conditions before taking the archive action.

It would be great if Atlassian exposed a proper lastActivityDate (or equivalent) for spaces in CQL/Automation. That would make this type of cleanup flow much simpler and safer to automate.