How to manage Confluence suggestions to request access for team member

[Boyan Iliev]

Hello,

We are finalizing an overhaul of our confluence access. Now we have a consolidated access policy. New users get approved for respecting group or a "guest" account, which in term has appropriate access to the needed space(s).

My problem is that from time to time our users get suggestions to invite a "guest" user to view something with no obvious reason. I cannot expect that each user knows the access policy, so naturally - when they see such suggestions, they click "invite". Is there a way to manage these suggestions?

Most recent example:

1. A regular user created a brand new article.

2. As article got published, author got confluence native suggestion to request access for 2 guest users. He invited them....

3. The article did NOT mention these users.

4. The article is not mentioned in any JIRA ticket (yet).

5. The article owner did NOT invite the guest users over mail/teams/slack/etc.

6. The 2 guest users could not have stumbled on the article by coincidence as it was just created.

6. The space access is managed by 2 groups - admins and a "read-only" group, in which the 2 invited users are not part of.

7. There are no individual user invites or guest users with access to this space.

8. The article is in a space that is not part of any JSM knowledge base. Although the 2 guest users are "Customers" in a JSM project.

Any idea why the suggestion appeared in the first place and how to manage when and if it appears?

[Tomislav Tobijas · Accepted solution]

Interesting @Boyan Iliev ... So, in your example, these 2 users you've mentioned are not Confluence users (do not have a Confluence license) and have not been mentioned anywhere on the page (whether before or during publishing)?

Nor the user who published the page works with those users on any other site? E.g., if they collaborate on some other Confluence/Atlassian site.

Potentially, I guess you can completely turn off user invites if you navigate to Admin Hub > Products > User access settings > *Product invitation permissions, if that's an option.

Cheers,
Tom

[Boyan Iliev]

Thank you for the answer. I do not want to completely disable the invites. Currently they are set to "Require Admin Approval", thus the access request I received. Yet - if there are no other options, this would be the way to go.

This is the user setup, and the notification that I get. The user does have an active JIRA license and a JSM account that was never used. None of the groups the user is in have access to confluence. Further more, we have ~30 more users with similar setup, who did not get invited...so why these 2 users?

Does confluence have some internal logic to suggest access based on user-based behavior? Maybe as you suggested - the article creator and these users are collaborating on another place and Atlassian decided it would be appropriate to suggest an access request?

[Tomislav Tobijas]

@Boyan Iliev At first glance, I would say that the user who created an invitation and this particular guest user work on some other space, and thus why the licensed user is receiving this popup to invite the guest user to a site (as a licensed user). But I cannot be sure here as only Atlassian staff can, probably, explain relations of how these work in the background.

You might want to check if there are any open suggestions (or bugs) when it comes to user invites: project = ID AND component = "Access requests - Invite" AND statusCategory != Done 

Additionally, I would suggest reaching out to Atlassian Support where you can mention for which users this is happening and I guess they can give you a specific explanation of why is it so.

If you get the official answer, I would appreciate it if you could share it here.

Cheers,
Tom

[Boyan Iliev]

Thank you @Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ for your thoughts. For now I'll disable invites as suggested.

I'm somewhat reluctant to contact support as we will go over the process of requesting access to our instance etc. If I end up contacting them, or get another tip on the reason, I'll surely post it here.

[Boyan Iliev]

@Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ , I ended up contacting support:

"Currently, there is no direct method for administrators to control the appearance of invite tips within these products. The display of such tips is managed by internal algorithms designed to enhance user engagement and improve the onboarding experience.

That said, administrators do have some control over invite-related settings. Specifically, you can disable the ability for end-users to invite managed accounts by toggling the "Allow end-users to invite managed accounts" option in the admin settings. Once this option is turned off, users will no longer be able to search for or invite managed accounts in Jira and Confluence."

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Probably not what most people want to hear, but well - at least there's something.

Anyway, thanks for sharing the info @Boyan Iliev !