"You are not permitted to perform this operation."

Question

This is driving me potty. I've got full administrator permissions to a live instance of Confluence, but quite often when I try to edit certain pages I get the error "You are not permitted to perform this operation.". This despite the fact that I'm in a group with god powers over the space (green ticks along the board). Even if I give my own user god permissions to the space, I still get the error. No restrictions are defined on the pages. The hyperlinks in the breadcrumbs above "Not permitted" are "Administration / Users".

We're using v5.8.9

I'm not after a diagnosis of the problem, as this is a highly-customised installation with lots of bespoke code and plugins, although if this does ring a bell with folk I'd be interested in your thoughts. What I do need to know is: how can I determine what "operation" I'm "not permitted to perform"? Do I have to go into the server logs, and if so which ones?

Thanks in advance...

Fred Riley · Answer

Hello all

Thanks for your replies. I tried to post an answer yesterday but was bounced back by the server, probably because I don't have enough points on Answers (I'll try to build those up by being a bit more helpful in other threads). With the help of our Confluence server admin, the main problem has been diagnosed, and basically it was a username mixup. He did also say that there might be a way of making error messages a bit more meaningful but he didn't go into detail, so does anyone here know where in the system config I can tweak errors so that they report what's happened, and to which space/page? This would also be useful for customising 404s, say.

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Answer

Just one quick comment. Being a Confluence Admin doesn't grant you access on the individual spaces. You have to add yourself into those space permissions.

Fred Riley · Answer

Thanks to all for your replies. I did try replying yesterday but couldn't comment because I didn't have enough 'points', and when I tried to answer I got a "You are not permitted to perform this operation." - D'OH!!

Jobin: it's happening all over. Interestingly, if I SU as a lesser user, I can edit pages.

Guilherme: this is a complex, customised live system, so I can't carry out such diagnostics, sensible as they are.

Anne: No, there are no restrictions anywhere.

I strongly suspect that the permissions problem is related to the authentication method (Shibboleth) that we're using, but as I mentioned in my initial post, it's not a problem diagnosis that I'm after (else I'd email support directly as we're paying customers) but rather a way of finding out what the flip the permissions error refers to. As a founder member of CREM (Campaign for Real Error Messages), it's very frustrating to not know what "operation" I'm "not permitted" to carry out, and what page/space the "operation" is banned on. Is there a way of finding this out, perhaps by tailing a log file?

Here's hoping that I'm allowed to post this answer...