Parent page with No Child Page

[davidsherer]

I have a parent page with no child page

How can I find the child page or have this page marked as a child?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

There's nothing wrong with a page having no descendants.  You have to stop somewhere, otherwise you'd have an infinite recursion.

I suspect what the highlighted line is trying to tell you is that there are child pages of that one, but you can't see any of them.  Check with the space admins what pages are restricted.

(There's also a possible caching/queuing problem - Confluence doesn't index everything immediately.  If a child page there has been deleted or moved elsewhere, and you've caught it before the index gets built for that page, it can show the "parent has child pages" > sign, but then not actually be able to list them.  Give it 10 minutes and refresh the page to see if it's that)

[davidsherer]

I am the admin. There are no hidden pages and it has been this way for weeks. Yes there is nothing wrong with it but I have like the Monk (Tony Shalhoub) syndrome. and this really bothers me. 

[Lusia Zaitseva]

I have this exact same question and problem!

[vova_rubinets]

Same issue for me. It happens if you create a child page from it by mistake and then close it without saving. Since the child page wasn't saved - you can not return to it and remove. So, this "parent" flag remains forever.

Very irritating. How to fix?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Delete the draft of the child page.

[vova_rubinets]

That draft is not visible, so it's not possible to open or select it to be able to remove.

And creating the new one - opens a new draft, but not the previous one

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, so does the draft not show when you go to the "global" confluence menu and hit "drafts" from the list on the left (overview / recent / starred / drafts)?

[vova_rubinets]

On this computer - no, global "drafts" page is empty. But I will check on Monday on the computer where I created that draft. Will tell you the results.

[Timur Amirov]

Same problem. New page created by mistake and closed without saving to cancel.

Sometimes it also happens if I drop a page A on another page B and drag A back out of B. The page B remains expandable, without children.

Nothing in "Drafts".

Any solution?

[Paul Sharkey]

I archived the parent page of the ghost page and then restored the parent page from Archive. This removed the expandable down arrow from the parent page.

[Sam Quinan]

Just tested and archive/restore seems to have worked on my end! While it would be nice if the default behavior were fixed, this seems to a viable workaround. 

[Peter Celuch]

Wow. Putting page into archive worked well. However, restoring is failing with a stupid message that my team has a huge archive queue... 1 page... *&^%$!%^&*(

EDIT: I changed parent parameter while restoring and it went well this time. Confluence is a mess.

[Doug Bland]

I was able to overcome this issue by dragging a page to be a child page and then move it back.

[Sunny]

This is best and simplest answer! 

Edit: However, on refresh the expand reappears.

[Tiffany Shum]

This just happened to me. I was able to solve it by making a copy of the page and nesting it under the original ghost parent page. Then I unnested the copy by dragged it back out of the parent page. The original page then changed back from a ghost parent to a regular page level. Once that happened I was able to delete the copy instead of the original page so I was able to maintain the link. I've only tried this once, hopefully this workaround is reproducible.

[Tiffany Shum]

Update: That only solved the problem temporarily. The ghost parent issue returned once the page was refreshed.

[Jenna Liebe]

I had the same problem, which has persisted for several weeks. Today I finally solved it by essentially remaking the page (copying all the content from the problem page over to a new page), and then deleting the original. Not the nicest solution, especially if there's a lot of content on the page, but it worked for me.

Unfortunately the renaming trick didn't work and my drafts section was empty, which is why I ended up just recreating the page.

[Sam Quinan]

Technically that's precisely what I was doing when the fluke renaming thing happened for me. But I haven't been able to reproduce that outcome.

I have had 2 separate occurrences of catching what I did quick enough and hitting "forward" to return after mindlessly using "back" to undo the act of creating an unintended child page to return to said page and officially delete it. But that's only a solution if you realize know that hitting "back" on an otherwise blank child page (without content there's no autosave which is probably where it gets assigned to "drafts") is what is causing the problem in the first place.

[Timur Amirov]

The only solution, I had done so far also in such a way. But it has the following disadvantages.

a) It is cumbersome, especially considering how often this happens (even with some Confluence experience, I keep making the same mistake).

b) Once the page is published, the links to it can be shared. Copying the page and deleting the original will invalidate the links.

[davidsherer]

Just an update on my opening situation. I have done nothing to my system yet the problem is gone. Wish I knew what happened.

[Sam Quinan]

Such is often the case with weird bugs / behaviors. Eventually someone will figure how to actually reproduce it and then it'll get patched properly.

[Sam Quinan]

So I think I just accidentally figured out a solve?

I cannot recreate the issue to confirm, but in trying a workaround I temporarily renamed the offending page and published, and *poof* the page was back to being represented as a child. Renamed it back what I originally had / republished and the change stuck.

Now we just need someone else with the issue to confirm this was not just a fluke...

[Timur Amirov]

Already tried it before and just tried again, from the menu and in the edit mode. Unfortunately nothing changed, the page still thinks to have children :(

[Sam Quinan]

Ugh. Then whatever solved if for me was a fluke. That's unfortunate.