Allowing anonymous users to watch pages for changes

Question

Hi Atlassian Community,

I will admit that whenever I have to dive into Confluence permissioning, I get lost all over again, so forgive me if this answer is really simple.

I have a knowledge base site set up on Confluence for our company's API documentation, and users of our software would like to be able to watch the space and/or certain pages within the space for changes.

Right now the "users" of our confluence site are just members of my company's team, not subscribers to our software. I don't want the people subscribing to our software to be able to add/edit/delete pages, but I would like to allow them to be able to add comments and watch pages.

What is the best way to set this up? I don't see a way to make it so that an anonymous visitor to our confluence documentation site can create a login that just gives them permission to comment and/or watch a page. Can someone point me to the best resources?

Thanks!

Lucy

Davin Studer · Answer

I believe that when a user signs up themselves they are put into the "confluence-users" group. So, you would just need to set the perms for that group to be limited to viewing and commenting and then create groups that grant greater access for others.

Lucy Barber_py2v2k · Answer

Thanks, Davin! I know you said "create logins" -- there's no way to set it up so that people that come to the site can create their own logins and those automatically get assign to a certain security group, is there?

Davin Studer · Answer

You need to have a login to be able to comment on a page. However you could build an RSS feed for anonymous users to put into a feed reader to see page changes. The url is below. By default it will create a feed that requires authentication. You can change that by  removing the "&os_authType=basic" at the end of the url. Keep in mind that an anonymous feed only allows shows what an anonymous user has access to see. So, the space would need to allow anonymous access. If you don't want to allow the space to have anonymous access then you would need to create logins for all the people. It is possible to lock down those logins to view and comment permissions though.

https://{yourinstance}/wiki/dashboard/configurerssfeed.action