How do I remove the 'adding comments' from anonymous users?

Question

As it says on the tin. We have dozens of publicly viewable spaces, most of them have anonymous comments enabled. This was OK for years, but eventually spammers found this hole.

Even with CAPTCHA enabled a lot of spam comments are manually put in (almost all from China, Russia, India, Venezuele, India).

Thus, the time has now come to disable anonymous comments.

Because we have so many spaces, I'm looking for an automated way to remove the privileges from all spaces. Is this possibel? SQL is no problem here.

Thanks

Peter Vojtech · Answer

While it's only hiding comments from anon. users, this is a way to achieve this:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-hide-page-tools-and-comments-section-for-anonymous-users-in-confluence-697139365.html

Dick Visser · Answer

You're right. I just found out that my SQL solution in fact did NOT work.

Or, not any more. I swear that the anonymous comment was gone when I applied the commands, but several hours later it's there again. Even though the permissions manager shows a red cross.

If I manually enable all permissions, then disable, then it works.

I'll try the CLI tools now.

Bob Swift · Answer

You have to be careful with the SQL approach not to corrupt your database (from a Confluence perspective). You should also not do SQL on a live server. For some things, you may be able to get away with it and it is hard to know what cases those are or if it changes from one release to another :( .