Deleting a Personal Space in Confluence?

[Aaron Williams]

We don't have too many personal spaces in Confluence, but we do have a handful of personal spaces created by people who are no longer in the business.

I'm a fan of keeping old content around, especially if they had some meeting notes or blog posts that I could refer back to... but they don't. They are just empty. That's not strictly true, there is some tumbleweed floating around.

I know there is no current way to get around this such as with team spaces; permission recovery and deletion from the space settings.

I know I can ask a user to delete their space before leaving the keys behind, but who wants to do that on their way out the door?

We manage our users via a G-Suite sync, but I feel icky reactivating their account just to go and delete a space that way...

What's everyone else's thoughts, ways around, fixes, or ideas for this?

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

Hi @Aaron Williams

You should be able to delete the personal spaces, just as you would any space, by going into the space and selecting the Space Setting.   

You may have to do this before deactivating the user account, but I was able to do it for several test accounts. 

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

You can also chose to archive it under the space details, choosing Edit Space Detail and selecting archive under Status

[Aaron Williams]

@Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_ - Interesting.. I don't see this for our Personal Spaces.

Here's a screenshot of the Space Settings page for a Personal Space created by an active user, he created this space around 6 weeks or so ago, and has even been updating some content today.

This is probably related to the idea that we allow our users to create their own Personal spaces, hence being left out of the administrator list for that space.

If I go into Site Administration for Confluence and look at Space Permissions, I don't see a section for Personal Spaces where I can recover permissions to those spaces.

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

@Aaron Williams

We also allow the users to create their space.  I am wondering if you are missing some permission or some such that will allow you to fully see in there, as it looks like you are also missing other configuration options in the space settings. Maybe have a look at your Global Permissions.  Mine are set like such and the account I am logged into is an administrator and a site-admin.

[hazel.scannell]

I'm having the same problem. 

My global settings are the same as above but I still don't have the option to disable or delete personal space even though I am a administrator.

Can anyone help resolve this please?

Oh using Confluence Cloud 

[Yves Godin]

Same problem for me. 

Any solution ?

[Oscar Beltran]

Same problem here, has someone found a solution?

[Dominic Lagger]

Hi all

I found this bug (CONFCLOUD-57701), which is closed.

But perhaps the workaround still exist

Reach the Delete Space using a URL hack https://YOURINSTANCENAME.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/removespace.action?key=*SPACEKEY*

I found also this post, where Darryl sais:

I agree, you should be able to, but in Cloud you cannot. It requires "super admin" rights, which are not available to administrators, only to Atlassian staff.

Regards, Dominic

[Lars Roth]

I know this is a pretty old post but I saw a lot of other posts without solution for this topic and Confluence Server (not cloud) . #sharingiscaring

I had in "Global Permissions" full permissions >  Confluence+System but still was not able to see personal spaces.

The solution to see and delete them is to get "Super User" rights by the confluence-administrators group. Thanks to Igor from Atlassian support! After that you can also user the URL hack.

Read more:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/confluence-admin-permission-levels-explained-604209420.html

[Benedek Farkas]

I'm a normal administrator in my org, but I can archive/delete personal spaces in our Confluence (Cloud), so this functionality might've changed in the meanwhile.