My Confluence space is inaccessible despite allowing Anonymous Access

[Hezy Asher]

Hi

I made my Confluence site public and allowed anonymous access to the space I'd like users to access. However, it seems only JIRA users from within the organization can access it now.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is a non-obvious quirk with "anonymous" that you may have run into.

There's two possible states for a human interacting with Confluence (or Jira for that matter). 

• I am logged in:  The system knows who I am, and will check all my actions against all the permissions for the things I try to do
• I am non logged in:  I am anonymous, so the system only lets me do things explicitly allowed to anonymous users

The counter-intuitive bit is that because a logged-in user is not anonymous, the permissions for anonymous do not apply to them.  You know who I am, so you're not checking for "anonymous", you're checking for what I can do!

This not obvious to humans - we tend to think "someone who is logged in should also see all the anonymous stuff", but logically, it's wrong (and computers are logical). 

From an admin point of view, it needs a bit more thought - when you use anonymous, you also need to think about which logged in users can see it as well.

[Hezy Asher]

Thanks a lot, that's really what's going on here.

[Fabienne Gerhard]

Hi @Hezy Asher,

where do you get your user information from? Are the anonymous users really anonymous? 

We had a similar problem. Using Microsoft AD Server for user directory, with no groups - our confluence knew everyone that appears in the AD.
-> means none of the users that are listed there (doesn't matter if they're users in Confluence) don't get anonymous access!

We made a general group in AD - and everyone who is not part of that gets anonymous access. 

Hope that helps