Confluence permissions structure
As a tool for communication and collaboration, we believe Confluence is at its best when everyone can participate fully. Confluence keeps a history of all changes to pages and other content, so it's easy to see who has changed what, and reverse any changes if you need to.
Confluence does, however, give you the choice to make your instance, spaces, and content as open or closed as you want to.
Permissions and restrictions aren’t customizable on the Free plan.
Levels of permission
There are three levels of permissions in Confluence: global permissions, space permissions, and content restrictions.
Global permissions
Global permissions are Confluence-wide permissions, and are assigned by Confluence administrators.
These permissions are pretty broad, and don't really interact with space permissions or content restrictions.
For full details, check out the Manage global permissions in the Administrator's Guide.
Space permissions
Every space has its own independent set of permissions, managed by the space admin(s), which determine the access settings for different users and groups.
They can be used to grant or revoke permission to view, add, edit, and delete content within that space, and can be applied to groups, users, and even to anonymous users (users who aren't logged in) if need be.
One thing to watch out for is where a user is a member of multiple groups. You may have revoked permission for that individual user to add content, for example, but if they're a member of a group that is allowed to add content, they'll still be able to create new content in the space.
If you can't get the result you want from space permissions, or you're not sure, check with one of your Confluence administrators to determine what permissions you should apply to individuals and groups.
Content restrictions
Content restrictions work a little differently to global and space permissions. Content is open to viewing or editing by default, but you can restrict either viewing or editing to certain users or groups if you need to.
Don't forget, every piece of content in Confluence lives within a space, and space permissions allow the space admin to revoke permission to view content for the whole space. Even the ability to apply restrictions to content is controlled by the 'restrict content' space permission.
How do permissions and restrictions interact?
You can restrict viewing of a content item to certain users or groups, so that even if someone has 'view' permission for the space, they won't be able to view that content.
If someone's a space admin and you've used content restrictions to prevent them viewing a piece of content, they won't be able to see the content when they navigate to it. As a space admin though, they can see a list of restricted content in the space and remove the restrictions.
What about links?
Space permissions and content restrictions affect how links to content are displayed.
If someone doesn't have 'View' space permission, links to content in that space won't be shown at all.
If someone has the "View" space permission, but the content has view restrictions, the link will be visible but they'll get an "access denied" message when they click the link.
Links to attachments are also affected. If the visitor doesn't have permission to view the content the attachment lives on, the link won't be rendered.
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