How to change the page author in Confluence Cloud?

[John Folley]

I'd like the change the author of a page to better reflect the ownership of a page.

There's a few questions about this but they seem to be old and don't relate to Confluence Cloud.

Is there a way?

[Manon Soubies-Camy _Modus Create_ · Accepted solution]

Hello John and welcome to Community!

There actually is a recent question about it: Is there a way to change the creator of a page on Confluence Cloud? .

Hope this helps,

- Manon

[Marek Zielonkowski]

TL;DR;

it is not possible (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-7247)

[Olaf]

Not possible.

That is exactly the answer I was looking for... 

NOT

Please everybody, vote for this feature on the JIRA panel...

[Svenn Bjerkem]

I am tired of voting for features. 

My meeting minutes summary page is marked as authored by the consultant setting up the space and that cause lot of unnecessary questions and doubt that this is actually the meeting notes from meetings guided by me.

[Karl]

When I "need" to do this, I just copy the page that I want to change the owner on. As soon as I copy the page, I become the "Created By" person on the page.

[Svenn Bjerkem]

Sounded easy, so I gave it a try. Page names have to be uniquely named within one space, so my solution was to rename the "Meeting Minutes" title into "old Meeting Minutes" and move them into my personal space and from my personal space copy them back into the original space. This way I didn't have to rename a lot of sub-pages of "Meeting Minutes". Nice workaround, thanks.

[Julien Bonastre]

Is it really a nice workaround though? 🙃🤣 

[W]

I am an editor not an author... so as I chop up peoples pages to reduce duplication and increase order, I should be able to set the original author... as far as I can tell, the author is the closest concept in this software to a document owner so it's pretty important to set that right. I have to have them do the editing otherwise and the obviously end up doing it wrong... so yeah, this should be a feature... Option > Change Owner > Send Message to Proposed Owner > Proposed Owner Confirmation > Ownership/Author Changes.

[Julien Bonastre]

👌🏼🙏🏼🚀💓

[Curtis Fox]

FYI - This functionality should be rolling out to folks soon (see this comment). I came across this post again, while looking for instructions on how to determine if that new functionality is live for my instance of Confluence. Hopefully they post some instructions on how to do this.

[Josh Saul]

Just so I’m clear, Atlassian provides a SaaS to a huge number of global enterprises, is itself a public company with a market cap of almost 40 billion dollars, and does not support a method to change Confluence page creators?

For companies that have experienced staff changes (ie all companies), the solutions is “just ignore the name of that person that is no longer with your company who authored all the pages”?

[Brian Vargyas]

I just ran across this issue as well due to staff changes.   Need to update the page creator information --- I find that unreasonable that one cannot do this.   I can change ownership of Jira projects, but not pages created on Confluence?

[Karl]

I still don't see the connection though. The person that authored the page is the person that authored the page, regardless of their employment status, connection with the company, etc. If you need to disclose resources / people that individuals can contact for additional questions or more details, isn't that a separate piece of metadata that is disclosed on the form - independent of who authored the form? Do companies go in and change the "From" name on all sent emails when an employee leaves a company / is no longer a consultant with a company?

[David Meredith]

I think the point is that the field used for author / creator is the one that's linked to all the functional bits of the system...

So any page updates / workflows / edits etc all go to the original author who, 99% of the time is the person that imported knowledge articles from the previous SD system...

There should be a field / metadata for 'Page Owner' that is related to all this stuff. So you can change the knowledge / page owner when they leave to someone more appropriate.

By all means have an original author field to indicate who first created the page, it's just not useful in the lifecycle of the page and working with the rest of the Confluence functionality.

[Carry Megens]

Spot on @David Meredith To rephrase shorter:
A business "page owner" can be different than the page "creator"
And ownership should be passed on to another owner when need arises.

[kristin whitaker]

@Karl  I've seen quite a few good use cases.   We want to change or add an "Author" and/or "Owner" field,   The creator is of minimal importance in my use case.     What is important is knowing who the author is and/or owner of the content, which is not always the same as the creator.   

Our search analytics tool has a sort feature for the "author" of these content sources that is designed to give our global team the ability to find experts on topics quickly but it can't be relied on because it pulls in who confluence calls "author" but that's actually the page "creator".     It doesn't help at all for confluence content.   

In every other tool that I have, I am able to change an "owner" when the original owner changes or leaves AND if I need to know the original owner, which is rarely the case, I just look at my audit logs. 

[Karl]

@kristin whitaker - Makes sense. Lots of different use cases / workflows out there. Would the copy page / delete old page approach to at least get that core piece of metadata (author / creator) changed work for you? I'm not claiming it's a glorious solution, but one that I have used myself when we have needed to do this: 1) clone / copy page, 2) delete the old (source) page you just copied, 3) rename the new page you just created as a result of the copy to be the title of the old page you just deleted, 3) make sure your new page is positioned in your page tree correctly, 4) done.

[kristin whitaker]

@Karl Thanks!  I don't think so.   If I understand the work around correctly, it would require the content owner to do the clone/copy in order to show up as the page creator.  If that is the case, then doing this would be a global effort.  The whole point of having a small team to move all the content into this new instance was because of time constraints on our technical resources.    

Over time,   as they create new content,  it will show correctly, unless they leave the company which making it a process to have the new owner recreate pages previously owned by someone else is clunky at best.   As an anal process person, it makes my eye twitch.  LOL   just kidding.  (kind of haha!)   

Thanks!

[Deleted user]

So the accepted answer for cloud is there is no solution? WOW, if only our clients accepted those solutions! I'll be using that in my next meeting with a client... I'll let you know how it goes!

[Julien Bonastre]

I'm guessing there's a reason you're a deleted user now.. made the switch to a superior platform like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, the list is endless

[Jamie Booth]

A work around could be to get the new owner to copy the page and delete the old one.  Painful, but you will get the result you are looking for.

[pat.kelly]

This will work from a page navigation standpoint (can park the page where the old one was) but it doesn't work from a bookmark standpoint (i.e., how most people navigate) since the page index changes when it's copied.  All permissions have to be re-applied as well, which can be quite onerous.  It's ludicrous that simply changing the author isn't supported.

[Julien Bonastre]

It's ludicrous how many organisations pay for Atlassian services and the amount that accompanies that as well..

The world is truly a bizarre place

[W]

@Julien Bonastre 

Its insane. Atlassian gives broken or missing standard functionality, then charges fees for plugins and creates a market place for suckers. It is sad how things become the standard because society needs a standard, those who hold the responsibility to manage it are focused on maximizing profits; a standard provides so much, like inherent integregatability. Its unfortunately what it does to society, we end up in misery having to deal with the consequences of their bloated architectural mistakes and greed every single day, continuous reinvention of wheels that end up looking like squares. It really is depressing... we know a team of 10 could build software 100x better than this in under a year and could provide it at 10% cost and still make a profit... the only value in Atlassian, Facebook, Twitter, etc. IMHO is actually the user base.

[Lasse H]

We use Confluence as a documentation site. The fact that you cannot alter or hide the author's name is absolutely ridiculous. I don't want my name (or that of any of my colleagues) to be permanently visible, nor do I want any GDPR conflicts regarding coworkers who have left our company.

This needs to be changed now.

[Tom Hudgins]

Apparently, this is now rolling out

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/transfer-ownership-of-your-page-to-another-person/

I don't see it yet...

[BushnevYuri]

The best workaround I could find in relation to ownership identification: 

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1225778/page-owner?tab=reviews&hosting=cloud

Kudos to its author! 

As always, Atlassian miss to implement the most basic and needed capabilities. 

[Iain Davidson]

Great find !  I'm posting your answer to other similar questions asked in the Community.

Maybe one day, Atlassian will just purchase the plug-in from the author and then make it a standard 'Admin - Advanced Tool' option.

[David Meredith]

I was looking for something similar. You can't change the author but you could add the Page Properties macro.

This can be hidden if you want but it'd allow you to specify the page owner / reviewer / review date or whatever as fields in there. You could then pull that into a report.

[Karl]

I've had to use the "copy page" approach when I have truly needed to do this, but have always assumed it is locked down / not changed, as that is the person that truly created the page (irrespective of employment status, staff changes, etc.). Probably for the same reasons you wouldn't change the user / date timestamp (created by) on a database record. Just guessing...

[Olaf]

That is surely something to consider in principle.

But at least someone with Admin privileges on Confluence should be able to purge the name of persons no longer working for the organization without having to resort to desperate measures like using SQL statements on the database (which isn't an option for cloudhostet installations anyways) or copying and deleting the respective pages manually (and thus destroying bookmarks, hierarchies and whatnot).

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

The page ownership experience can be improved by apps as many of you agreed on here. If you want to take it a bit further and see how you can:

• update page owners in bulk
• have multiple page owners or
• automate email notifications to them when pages expire,

I recommend this blog on 5 Confluence page owner best practices implemented with Better Content Archiving for Confluence.

(Please note that Better Content Archiving is a free/paid, supported app, and I'm part of the team developing it.)

[Iain Davidson]

FYI, after searching around various answers on similar questions.  There was a post to this paid plugin to change the owner of a page.
(disclaimer: I have not used this plug in to see how successful it is in updating. But I don't see any reason why one can't use the plug-in for only a month to change the pages, then don't renew subscription.)
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1225778/page-owner?tab=reviews&hosting=cloud

Here is some background on how to create a query to do it yourself.
https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-change-the-creator-of-a-page-720830744.html