How do I restrict groups from adding child pages to a page, if they have Space edit permissions?

Yaacov Weingarten February 7, 2018

I have a group X that is granted Page Add permission on my DOC Space. Within the DOC Space, I have some pages that members of X can edit and there are some pages that I have explicitly restricted editing permission to members of group Y.

However, it seems that people from group X manage to Create pages as children of the pages that they do not have edit permissions for. Is there a way of restricting members of Group X from adding pages to pages they cannot edit?

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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February 7, 2018

No, because they have "create page" rights in the space.  The only way to stop them adding pages beneath other pages would be to remove their "view" rights to the parent pages, so they cannot be on the page to create the child page.

Yaacov Weingarten February 7, 2018

Seems rather silly to me. Essentially, it is a "violation" of the edit restriction (especially if the parent page includes a "Children Display" macro) and in ways makes the restriction superfluous.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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February 7, 2018

Makes perfect sense to me.  Why should I not be able to create pages beneath other pages I can't edit?

Yaacov Weingarten February 7, 2018

Why shouldn't you be able to edit the page? - Obviously, the author of the page does not want you to. There may be situations where the author of the page does not want you to add child pages so that an outside observer will easily identify the source of the information for the entire sub-tree.

Or take the concrete case that I am working on - we have a documentation Space, where the group of Technical Writers are responsible for the content. There are a few pages within the Space, where developers are granted permissions to update the information, but they are not expected to generate new content, in order to enforce certain style guides. So the developers need to be granted the Space "Add page" permission, but only have "Edit" permissions for the pages they need to update. But this then allows them to create new "documentation" pages that may not adhere to the style guide. It would make more sense to allow them to comment on the documentation pages, but not create new pages.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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February 7, 2018

I'm sorry, I don't get why "I don't want people to contribute in our collaboration tool" is useful.  The worst case is someone adds a page in the wrong place.  Move it to the right place. 

With your approach, people will start creating pages in the wrong place, and you won't know anything about it until you realise it's a mess.

Deleted user September 22, 2020

I tend to agree with Yaacov.

With the inherited restrictions, you may well end up in a situation, where you create a parent page with edit restrictions. Later someone else is allowed to create a child page for the page.

At a later point in time you need to include confidential info on the parent page and therefor set up view restrictions. These will be inherited by all child pages and the creator of the child page will no longer be able to access their page.

The option of restricting of allowing child pages should at least be toggleable, I think.

nils_karlstrom June 29, 2022

I agree with Yaacov. It should not be possible to create pages under a page one do not have permission to edit. We have a structure in Confluence with certain categories. E.g.

  • Infrastructure
    • Servers
      • Test servers
      • Production servers

Today people create pages under the categorie "Servers" and that is wrong. Pages should only be created under "Test servers" or "Production servers". Therefore it should be possible to lock the page "Servers" so that it's not possible to create pages under that page.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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June 29, 2022

There's no reason to block people adding pages to a space.  It just doesn't make sense to say "no, you can't create a page" arbitrarily.  

nils_karlstrom June 29, 2022

It does make sense in my opinion, otherwise people will never learn. People just create pages in the root directory and the whole structure becomes a mess. It's impossible to find things if not someone regularly moves pages to the correct categorie in the structure.

By locking down certain categorie pages that problem could be avoided.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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June 29, 2022

Actually, you'll have the opposite problem.  Because people can't create pages where they think they should be, they'll go create them in an even worse place.

There used to be an app that could stop people creating pages in the wrong place.  The handful of people who installed it found it made their mess even worse, uninstalled it and the author dropped the app.

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nils_karlstrom June 29, 2022

Ok, I'll have to come up with another solution then. I guess I could write an informational message or something on our specific categorie pages. They are just blank anyway in its current form, we just use them for categorizing.

Oren Mano
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August 7, 2024

I know that this a two-year old post, but I'm trying again - I have a space that is organized by subject - teams/projects/products etc. All it has is a an hierarchy element that lists all the sub pages. The intent is that people will add content only under the child pages, so we don't end up with a list of 200 unorganized pages. But they don't and I have no way to restrict them.

Why don't confluence support 3 permissions levels at the page level - View,  Edit page, Add page?

The Space setup page  has 12 permission options! (including adding/deleting pages, attachments etc). 

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