Now Available - Define Stale Pages Based on Last Viewed Activity! 🎉

[#1]

👋 Community - Avinoam from Confluence Automation once again and this time with one of the most requested updates: With the all new "Branch rule / for each inactive page" you can now define your stale pages not just based on when they were last updated, but based on when they were last viewed! This can help make rules you build to either archive, send emails, or take action based on a page being stale/inactive a lot more accurate and representative of how its actually engaged with, or lack thereof.

What we used to support to date

Till now we supported via the Page Branch the ability to define a pages inactivity based on either when it was last created or updated, but now when it was last viewed - which is what so many of you have been asking for, and rightfully so 😀

What we now support in addition 

Now we support last viewed activity through a new branch type called Branch rule / for each inactive page:

When it this be available?

This is already available to all Confluence Premium and Enterprise customers!

We want to hear from you!

We’d love your feedback so please feel free to schedule time with us directly here or drop a comment on this post 

[Alex Young]

Thank you Avinoam, for this update! This is a cool feature and will probably be pretty useful. That being said, I think I would have preferred the functionality to be rolled up into the already existing Page Branch component for the sake of simplicity and the ability to use Author and views as criteria together.

[Dan Tombs]

@Avinoam Thanks for the update. I love the fact these parameters can now be used as I feel this was the final missing part of the puzzle in created a full A4C archival process. I'm going to look at editing our current rules to get this to work.

I do agree with @Alex Young point that it may have been cool to have more of a single branch rule with and the reason why is that actually it may be appropriate in certain scenarios for multiple parameters like viewed & modified etc. But it is 6 of one, half dozen of the other. The cool thing is that this functionality is here.

Great work from you and the team. Cannot wait for your next update.

[Avinoam]

@Dan Tombs @Alex Young apologies for replying in such a delay - I must have missed these in my notifications :) 

I don't disagree with you! In full transparency, when we set out to add this the original approach was to include this in the existing branch, however, the more we looked into it we noticed that it would introduce both technical and usability issues which would cause us to spend more time that originally planned to overhaul the existing experience. So the cleanest, most scalable, and fastest way to get this into your hands was to create a net new branch to accommodate this.

Thank you so much for the feedback!

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

This is interesting!

Let me note that the Better Content Archiving app offers an alternative approach to Confluence automations, which we designed and implemented to be extremely flexible. Configurability was a number one driver, because we have learnt a lot since we released the app for Server and Data Center 10+ years ago.

In this particular use case, for example, instead of using hardwired triggers, you can define the condition that selects the pages to archive using the flexible queries! The queries are written in the CQL structured query language, a super-powerful concept, similar to Jira's JQL.

A few popular condition idea used by our users:

• You can archive the page if it was not viewed in the last N days.
• You can archive the page if it was not updated in the last N days.
• You can archive the page if it was not updated in the last N days or not viewed in the last M days. (N and M can be equal. Note the logical operator!)
• You can archive the page if it was not updated in the last N days and not viewed in the last M days.
• You can archive the page if it had a specific archiving date and it is passed.
• You can archive the page if any of its ancestors had a specific archiving date and it is passed! (Meaning that you can archive a page of trees by setting an archiving date to the root page!)
• You can archive the page if it was (any combination of the previous conditions) and it is not labelled with "no-archive". (Safety belt with a label.)
• You can archive the page if the page was in the "To archive soon" custom status for N days, but during that nobody updated its content. (Custom statuses that allow someone to step-in and disable the upcoming archiving.)
• ... a lot more! (more ideas for inspiration)

I suggest that for those who want more flexibility, give this a try! (It is free for 10 users with no limitations BTW.)

[Brian Collins]

How can I write the titles/URLs of those inactive pages to a database or spreadsheet? 

Basically, I would like to create a db/spreadsheet, then run the branch rule on all inactive pages in the last 6 months, THEN 'write page title and URL to DB' 

Is that possible?