Tips for Confluence Administrators: Part 4

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In Tips for Confluence Administrators: Part 3 we talked about the millions of Confluence users who came up with many suggestions, such as

• Global Find and replace
• Record permission changes in page history
• Text statistics like word count, character count, etc.
• Support for vertical alignment of table cell contents

As a system administrator, do you spend more time dealing with the Confluence system alone, or with the end users of Confluence?

I happen to be half and half!

In addition to meeting the new features proposed by users, answering users' questions about system usage, and finding alternatives to known system defects, I believe you also need to spend a lot of time researching how to make the system more secure, stable, and highly available.

This will involve the content we are going to talk about in this article, including the distinction of users, the prohibition of some risky behaviors of users, the security policy of passwords, the security of macros, and so on.

• How to identify inactive users in Confluence
• Not able to copy comments in Confluence
• Make Confluence Space Permissions page read-only
• Disable the display Creator, Last update And who updated
• Restrict creating pages in the home page of a space
• Enforce Password Complexity in Confluence
• HTML macros are disabled by default
• Redirect Confluence users to a new URL
• Get a list of active users counting towards the Confluence license
• Get the number users and groups in Confluence Server and Data Center
• Hide Move and Copy menu for pages

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How to identify inactive users in Confluence

If you want to disable inactive users to prevent them from being counted towards a Confluence license, it is possible to find out by running SQL queries against your database. This is particularly useful if you have a large number of users.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-identify-inactive-users-in-confluence-214335880.html

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Not able to copy comments in Confluence

I am trying to copy a Page containing several child pages from one space(target) to another(source).

The copy process was completed but the comments for two of the pages weren't there in the target space.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Not-able-to-copy-comments-in-Confluence/qaq-p/1177546

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Make Confluence Space Permissions page read-only

In our Environment we mange the Space permissions not from within Confluence.

Permissions are managed in a central component and are updated in Confluence using a REST API.

We don't want that Space Admins can change permissions in Confluence directly.

Question: Is there a possibility to make the Space Permission Page read-only?

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-to-Make-Confluence-Space-Permissions-page-read-only/qaq-p/870279

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Disable the display Creator, Last update And who updated

How to disable the display Creator, Last update And who updated?

Click on Space tools(space admin section) -> Look and Feel -> Stylesheet

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-to-disable-the-display-Creator-Last-update-And-who-updated/qaq-p/1024503

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Restrict creating pages in the home page of a space

In Confluence I would like to restrict users from creating pages directly in the home page of a space. In lower levels of the hierarchy page creation should be permitted. This is to prevent from changing a default configuration of the uppermost level of pages in a space.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Can-I-restrict-creating-pages-in-the-home-page-of-a-space/qaq-p/991528

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-do-I-prevent-users-from-creating-sub-pages-in-confluence/qaq-p/335302

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Enforce Password Complexity in Confluence

Though Confluence alone does not provide password complexity controls out-of-the-box, you can integrate Confluence with your LDAP or Active Directory and configure password controls in your external directory.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-do-i-enforce-password-complexity-in-confluence-346947947.html

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HTML macros are disabled by default

HTML macros are disabled by default

The HTML macro will only be available if it has been enabled by an administrator. Enabling these macros can make your Confluence site vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/html-macro-38273085.html

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Redirect Confluence users to a new URL

When content is moved, the Confluence administrator may need to redirect users from an old page (URL) to a new one.

For example, when pages are merged into a new one, you may need to keep the old page and redirect readers to the latest version.

Also, when Spaces are moved from a legacy instance to a new one, users might still try to access content through the legacy instance and they should be automatically redirected to the new one.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-redirect-confluence-users-to-a-new-url-976758203.html

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Get a list of active users counting towards the Confluence license

To know the exact users count against your license in Confluence.

Confluence's license count is based on Global Permissions. Users will count towards the license in the following ways:

• If the User is a member of a group that has global permissions to use Confluence

• If the User is individually granted global permissions to use Confluence

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-get-a-list-of-active-users-counting-towards-the-confluence-license-298978076.html

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Get the number users and groups in Confluence Server and Data Center

The number of users and groups, and the depth of nested groups can contribute to performance and other stability problems in your instance.  However, it can be difficult to find out the exact number of users and groups being synched from your LDAP directory, especially if you have nested groups. 

If you experience problems, or you want to make sure you don't exceed our recommended guardrails, you can use the following queries to check the total number users and groups. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-get-the-number-users-and-groups-in-confluence-server-and-data-center-1163763946.html

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Hide Move and Copy menu for pages

Some customers may want to prevent Move or Copy options for pages, but there is no separate permission to disable those specific functions.

As a workaround, we can hide the Move and Copy menus with below Javascript in General Configuration > Custom HTML, and the end of BODY section.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-hide-move-and-copy-menu-for-pages-1019399745.html

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Tips for Confluence Administrators: Part 1

• How to disable attachment downloads
• How to hide elements in Confluence using CSS or JavaScript
• How to skip the onboarding page (welcome.action) for new users in Confluence
• confluence.collab.edit.user.limit
• How to put an iFrame into Confluence
• Finding Unused Spaces or Pages
• How do I make my page completely private?
• How to prevent a Space Administrator from delete their Space?

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 Tips for Confluence Administrators: Part 2 

• Restore same name pages from trash should not overwrite the existing page but add a history version

• As a user I want Saved for later page/tab in Confluence to have the same sorting mechanism

• Copy/paste table cells does not work as expected when header cells are merged
• Confluence allows Page to be renamed to a title that has already existed(and restricted)
• Limited number of users with the same name appeared in the page restriction search
• Can't Copy Table Header
• Duplicated content in pages after running Synchrony Hard Data Removal
• Nested table cannot be resized

• Support for assigning a task to multiple users

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Tips for Confluence Administrators: Part 3 

• Global Find and replace

• Link Report/Link Validator
• Record permission changes in page history
• Page edit permissions should be inherited by pages, like view permissions are
• Text statistics like word count, character count, etc.
• Provide ability to override Lucene tokenisation and stemming and search for exact text (literal search)
• Allow admins to change Lucene's stop words
• Disabling the ability to view the "Page History" on a space
• Support for vertical alignment of table cell contents
• Reverse ordering of comment lists

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[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Awesome series for admin tips @Ollie Guan!

Well done!

[Soo Park_Open Source Consulting]

Very useful tips, @Ollie Guan

非常感谢你的好建议。🤭

[Airyn]

Very helpful! Thanks!

[Andy Gladstone]

Pretty authoritative, the articles keep getting better!

[Miriam Hopton]

Love the tips!

I really wish there was a way to look up inactive users in Confluence Cloud - the search queries would be helpful. Right now, I just go admin panel --> Active Users --> export --> Confluence users and sort by Last seen in Confluence --> anything with Never accessed, they have not logged in or you can see the last log in date.