Public Links and Guest Users - Can't View When Logged In?

[Brendan O_Brien]

Hi All,

We have a handful of guest users on our account, and a handful of pages that we have made publicly available (public link sharing). These pages are not in the guest users' assigned space.

When clicking a public link, our guest users first see the following:

But when they click "open in Confluence", the page shows up as "access restricted":

This seems like a bit of a bug/unexpected behavior, as the information is clearly first visible, but then is rendered not visible.

Is there a workaround, or something I am missing? Thanks.

Why does the content in a publicly linked page show up like this when a guest user is logged into their account?

Note: We do not want any of our spaces to have anonymous access as this is primarily an internal resource and only very select information.

[Angela Thomas_Seibert Group · Accepted solution]

Hello @Brendan O_Brien 

Expanding on what @Kristian Klima wrote, our team compiled a guide on this topic: https://seibert.group/blog/en/confluence-anonymous-access-vs-public-links/. Hope it's useful.

[Kristian Klima]

@Angela Thomas_Seibert Group That should be in the Atlassian's Confluence docs :) 

[Brendan O_Brien]

Awesome guide, thank you Angela! This is seriously good documentation.

[Kristian Klima · Accepted solution]

Hi @Brendan O_Brien 

This is the expected behavior.

A shared public link is an add hoc HTML link constructed for the sole purpose - to allow anonymous users to access that specific page. Downside is that ANYONE on the internet with access to that link can see your content on that page. That link is different from the native Confluence link for that page.

Guests can access one specified space at a time. 

Consequences:

• when a guest views the shared public link, they view it as an anonymous user.
• when they try to access the same page on Confluence, and the page is outside of their 'allowed' space, they will get the 'no access' message. To view the content, they must use the shared link.

One more thing, shared public links are always shared in isolation, so if you share two pages that are mutually linked on Confluence, those mutual links will not work. Mentioning this only because it comes up frequently in debates on shared public links.

[Brendan O_Brien]

Kristian, 

That is very helpful - thank you for increasing my understanding.

I think we know what we need to do in order to best construct a guest Space for our external collaborators.