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How do I remove the permissions for the owner/creator or a personal space in Confluence?

Andy Boze

I have a number of personal spaces that are not being used. I don't want to delete the spaces yet, but I don't want the users who created them (or anyone else) to be able to view or administer them. I set the Group permissions to allow confluence-administrators to have full control. Then I deselect all permissions for the user who created the space. When I click the "Save All" button, the user remains with full permissions to the space. Is there any way to remove a user's permissions to the space he created?

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I'm afraid you can't pull the owners permissions to their space. A user's personal space belongs exclusively to them, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to remove their rights.

One immediate problem - if you did it, they suddenly couldn't see it and clicked "create my personal space" again.

Filipe Dias

Hello.

For me that makes no sense.

As the administrators of the instance we should be given the tools to manage all the content and accesses of the Instance, whether it's a JIRA project or a Confluence Personal or not space. We might decide that personal spaces are not to be shared with any other members of the team, so, we might want to remove only the admin permissions to the owners.

If a user has a personal space and has admin permissions to it he can do lot's of things he doesn't even know is doing, like for ex using the personal space to share work content with another team, and them he leaves the company and the space lies there as a zombie space and not managed centrally. And deleting ir might make us loose important information and we don't know about it.

So, being able to remove "Admin" permissions to the personal space owner is a must.

Thanks.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I do see your thinking there, but there's an important element that I think you're missing here.

There is a word that is vastly under-emphasised here. When we say "a personal space", Confluence really does mean personal. It absolutely belongs to that individual.

Your organisation certainly owns the service the space is within, and your admins do have admin rights over personal spaces. But the personal spaces are for that person, not the rest of the organisation.

"Being able to remove admin permissions from a personal space owner is a must" is absolutely wrong. It's the wrong way of thinking about it, not for any of the reasons you give being wrong, but because you're not realising that the space belongs to them. By definition, it's theirs, and hence they absolutely always should have admin rights over it. Because it's theirs.

The right way to think about it is that it's their space. If people are doing "bad" things, then you need to think about how to deal with the problems they cause (and don't get me wrong, get 2 or more confluence users in a system and I will guarantee that at least half of us will abuse our personal spaces in some way, mostly unintentionally, but it's going to happen)

So, when you feel there's a need to take away admin from the owner of a space, that's the point at which the space is not really a personal space any more.

Don't take their space away from them. Move everything they're misusing to the right shared space, and let them carry on with their own space.

There's a simple rule to give to all your Confluence users that can help with the way they (and you) are seeing personal spaces:

Assume anything in a personal space is wrong

In Adaptavist's Confluence, that's a hard rule, with a minor exception - your personal home page is assumed to be a valid "profile of this human". Anything else is wrong, until it's moved into a proper shared space. And we have HR/data rules - if someone moves or leaves, they're asked to review their personal space and move anything before they go. Then their colleagues review it after they go, but before it gets deleted.

Filipe Dias

Hello Nick.

Thank you for your answer.

Yes, I totally understand the concept of "Personal" space, and I know if the users have the possibility to create one, then it's theirs to use as they well please.

The question is, if you have more than 700 users and a great deal of them don't even know what they are doing in terms of respecting company information policies and documents sharing, etc, etc, it becomes very hard to manage all this situations. The rotation rate of workers is very big here, so, we can't keep track of all the spaces and it's information before hand. The process is "automatic", if a worker leaves the company their stuff is deleted.

Yes the spaces are theirs bot at the end of the day they belong to the company, and I can't start talking to 300 users one by one explaining them they can't use the personal space to share corporate information within teams. They just won't do it and they will keep on doing things the easiest way they can/know (believe me, I've tried).

Unfortunately it's very hard to "educate" such a big and heterogeneous universe of users and I see myself forced to have some strict restrictions. I still give them the possibility to have a space where they can publish what ever they want, but now, this ones are created by me and restricted only to each user. They can't share it with anyone. This is very important to us. This is all I need.

Thank you very much for you time.

Filipe

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