Confluence spaces with too many permissions

This insight checks whether any of your spaces exceed the recommended number of permissions. 

Confluence spaces that have too many permissions will have their overall performance affected, including navigating around the page tree, viewing the space, and viewing and editing pages in the space. 

What permissions are counted?

We count every individual permission granted to a user or group. For example, if a single user receives Add pages, Delete pages, and Delete comments, they count as 3 permissions towards the guardrail.

The following image includes 20 permissions in total. But, since all of them are granted to groups, many people get the permissions they need while keeping the number low.

What's the recommendation?

Confluence doesn't have a native way to remove permissions in bulk. You can do that manually, but with the guardrail set above 20,000 permissions per space, that can turn out to be quite time consuming. We recommend checking the Confluence cleanup guide to apply best practices – what exactly you choose depends on how important your space is and whether you can, for example, divide it into smaller spaces.

For this case, most probable actions include:

• Check Marketplace apps that help with cleanup

• Start moving away from this space by creating new spaces for teams or new projects

• Archive the space, or back it up as XML and delete it

• Divide the space, for example by main parent pages, and move it to smaller spaces

In all of the cases above, you'd also need to change your approach to permissions. The easiest way to do it is to assign permissions to groups instead of individual users, which can significantly reduce the number of permissions you have.

Review affected spaces

When viewing this recommendation from the dashboard, copy the SQL query and run it on your database.

The query returns:

• Names of affected spaces

• Permission count for each space

Follow best practices for space maintenance

Spaces with too many permissions often is a problem that can't be fixed easily or just be a one-time effort. If you have a high number of such spaces, it might mean you need change your approach to creating and managing content, for example by:

• Assigning owners: Assign Confluence gardeners and owners who will do periodical cleanup and maintenance of specific areas of Confluence.

• Themed spaces: Divide your spaces into smaller ones used by specific teams or projects. 

• New spaces for new projects: Start moving away from large spaces and create new, smaller spaces whenever a new project comes in.

• Regular cleanup: Do periodical cleanup of inactive or stale content, with the help of Confluence analytics or Marketplace apps.

Confluence cleanup guide

For best practices and ideas on how to do an overall cleanup, see Confluence cleanup guide.

Confluence cleanup area

You can also find quick links to retention rules, analytics, or space archiving in Confluence by going to Administration > General configuration > Clean up.