Conflicting space and page level permissions – how to set?

[Morten Nyhus]

I’m having problems with setting up the permissions as I need. As a general rule I work with 3 permission groups:

A space specific group named spacekey-admin. This group is granted all rights and have a very limited no of members.

A space specific group named spacekey-users. This group is granted all rights except all deletes, export and manage. The group contains the primary users of the space.

The standard Confluence-users group. This group is granted view rights and add comments, all other rights is revoked.

All spaces are set up this way. The reason for this setup is, that everyone is able to view everything in every space, but only the primary users of a space are able to change the content of a particular space.

This works fine, and I’m able to restrict the group Confluence-users for a specific page and its subpages, by setting the permissions for that particular page to "Only specific people can view or edit" and only setting the “Can Edit” option for the space specific admin and user groups.

Now to my problem:

I have a space setup as above, but where I have a need for the Confluence-users group to be able to add pages as subpages for one of the root pages in the space. If I set the page permission for the root page to “Can Edit” for the Confluence-users group, they can’t add subpages.

If I then grand the Confluence-users group the space permissions to add pages and set the page permissions on all other root pages to "can view", Confluence-users can still add pages for these root pages.

 None of these result in what I need. A) If I restrict Confluence-users at space level, I can’t grant them rights to edit a root page and add subpages to it. And B) If I grant the add rights on space level, I can’t restrict the possibility to add subpages.

 As I read the documentation regarding permissions, they are additive, and Confluence is open by default. With that in mind I would expect that when one set of permissions revokes a permission and another one grants the same permission, the one that grants wins. That is not the case as I can’t do that as described above as A).

In this post Solved: What, exactly, is Confluence's permission inherita... (atlassian.com) I should be able to grant add rights at space level, but revoke it by using page permissions for all other root level pages, and thereby restrict the Confluence-users group from adding new subpages to these pages.

 No matter how I combine permissions, I’m unable to achieve what I need. My question is can it be done in the first place, and if it can how to do it?

[Rilwan Ahmed · Accepted solution]

Hi @Morten Nyhus ,

Welcome to the community!!

If a group has "create page" rights in the space permissions,  then only way to stop them from  adding pages beneath parent pages would be to remove their "view" rights to the parent pages, so they cannot be on the page to create the child page.

I am not sure if there is any plugin which does your work. You can search in marketplace