How to delete personal spaces created in Confluence by users who have now left the organization?

Milan Chheda [INFOSYSTA]
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February 11, 2019

We had few users who created personal spaces as well as other documentation spaces. They have now left the organization. So, as a part of clean-up as well as to keep Confluence clean, we want to delete unwanted pages/spaces as well as personal spaces created by those users.

How do we access/delete those personal spaces and their respective pages? Or How do we transfer that to someone so that other user can access/delete those spaces?

Since those spaces were personal, even the administrators don't have access to it. So how do we clean them up?

5 answers

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1 vote
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Sireesha Dugginapeddi [Appfire]
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February 11, 2019

Hi @Milan Chheda [INFOSYSTA],

As a System Admin or site admin, one can always -

  1. Navigate to Space directory (Spaces > Space directory)
  2. View the details of the space (you intend to) by clicking the info icon of the respective space
  3. In the Overview tab -

    Space Details
    - you can edit the details of the space including changing the name of the space and adding/deleting/managing user permissions to the space.

    Delete Space
    - you can delete the space by clicking OK.

The system admins will always have access to all the spaces. You can also look into this page for help.

Hope it helps!

@Salla Yes! Admins do have permissions.

 

Thanks
Sireesha

Milan Chheda [INFOSYSTA]
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February 11, 2019

Thanks @Sireesha Dugginapeddi [Appfire]. So the local administrator does have access to all spaces and he can either transfer or delete the space. 

But isn't that weird. How do I ensure, as a user, that I have a space and that is completely personal to me. Nobody should be able to see the content or the pages that are inside my space, not even admin. Do you know how to achieve that?

Thanks for the solution though.

Thomas Wohlwend October 10, 2024

The term "Personal Space" in Confluence is misleading. Anyone has access to your personal space as long as you don't explicitly deny access to the space or individual pages.

2 votes
Henrique ALVES January 3, 2024

Hello,

Is there an automated method to remove personal Confluence spaces belonging to departed employees?

It's impractical to manually delete all these spaces when users leave the company. Establishing a governance process for this seems necessary.

1 vote
Salla February 11, 2019

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think System Administrators and the members of the confluence-administrators group can view and delete personal spaces. Confluence Administrators can't.

Milan Chheda [INFOSYSTA]
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February 11, 2019

Nope, Confluence administrator's can't. It's a personal space created by users, so even Admins won't have access to it unless the permission is granted by the user.

Edit:

So the local administrator is able to access those space and can thereby delete them. Thanks!

0 votes
Thomas Wohlwend October 10, 2024

I have the same issue. Was able to delete the personal space as a confluence admin but execution stopped after 79%, saying it was not able to delete the personal space.

Log says  NullPointerException at com.atlassian.confluence.impl.labels.LabelPermissionEnforcerImpl.userCanEditLabelOrIsSpaceAdmin(LabelPermissionEnforcerImpl.java:108

Any ideas? Can I remove the space from the database?

0 votes
Sireesha Dugginapeddi [Appfire]
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February 11, 2019

Hope it works!

 

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