How to search for pages created by an inactive user?

[Larry Peery]

Use Case: Employee A works at the Acme Company for 1 year and has spent much time documenting in Confluence. Employee A leaves Acme Company and is now an inactive user. 

Employee B needs to reference all pages created by Employee A

While Employee A's name is retained on the pages created "Created by Employee A (Unlicensed)" if you click through to the profile no created pages are displayed.

When trying to search inactive users do not populate in the "Contributors" search field. 

How can Employee B find this body of work?

[Shannon S]

Hello Larry,

I came across your duplicate question of this, when I found this thread, and I discovered that you had also raised a support ticket.

In the support ticket, we let you know that this is a limitation of Confluence at the moment and there is a feature request for this below:

• CONFCLOUD-41303 Allow searching for content contributed or created by disabled user

Workaround

You can manually edit the URL for the search to work. For example, here's a search URL if I select my own user as the Contributor:

https://[redacted].atlassian.net/wiki/search?search_id=7c70cd94-0571-4f56-8b32-e96fd3f7c9f7&contributors=557058%3A4030fda2-XXXX-XXXX-b775-15973e041410

I go to admin.atlassian.com, and I can compare the ID for my user plus the disabled one by right-clicking the username and copying the URL:

Mine: 

https://admin.atlassian.com/s/62fe28c4-9ee9-4536-a9e4-01e3814164d0/users/557058:4030fda2-XXXX-XXXX-b775-15973e041410

Disabled user: 

https://admin.atlassian.com/s/62fe28c4-9ee9-4536-a9e4-01e3814164d0/users/557057:b05d28ce-XXXX-XXXX-893d-1335811623e9

Therefore, I can then replace my ID with the one for the disabled user:

https://[redacted].atlassian.net/wiki/search?search_id=449d0783-6938-43fd-8321-c29876fa4e9e&contributors= 557057%3Ab05d28ce-XXXX-XXXX-893d-1335811623e9

Can you give that a try and let me know how that goes for you?

Regards,

Shannon

[Larry Peery]

Yes, that works as a work around that I as an admin can provide for people. The issue that I am faced with now is that I cannot expect a standard user to piece together a URL. I'm hoping that a solution is provided for CONFCLOUD-41303.

Thanks,
Larry

[Shannon S]

Hi Larry,

Thank you for confirming. Yeah, it's a bit more complicated for end users, but I figured it would at least help you to get the data you need right now.

I included the workaround on the bug so hopefully it can help anyone else who might be struggling.

Take care, and have a pleasant rest of your week.

Regards,

Shannon

[Habib Rahman]

Hi Larry, 

I think there is a way. I just updated the Jira story in comments. 

This is how I was able to find. 

Open the space, expand the 'Space contributors' list. There I could see all users who contributed, including deactivated users. Click on the names and it shows all (or most ) of the pages created by them. 

[James Dellow]

Can I strongly suggest you raise this with Atlassian Support.

You could probably find them using a CQL search, if you can work out the the old user's account ID. But I suspect you won't be the first person to ask this and in the era of GDPR, an officially supported way of doing this would be useful. Or even a "transfer this deactivated users's pages to this user" function.

[Larry Peery]

Thanks for the reply. I have opened an issue with Atlassian Support, JST-529615. 

I was able to piece together a search using https:// our instance /wiki/dosearchsite.action?cql=contributor.accountId%3D%22 userId %22 but this is not something I can expect an end user to do.