As a global Confluence admin how do I administer access to a space?

[Tom Atkinson]

I am an administrator of Confluence, but I am unable to grant a user with admin access to a space. Specifically, when I go to Project Settings for the space, the "Permissions" tab is not visible. 

The support documentation says that I need to be a Confluence Global Administrator to do this, but as far as I can tell, I am a full administrator in Confluence. Is the "Global Administrator" one level higher?

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

Confluence is using three different permissions: Global permissions and covers things like space creation and wether a user can log in. Space permissions determines that access to the space and what the user can do. And the last one is page restrictions, which is different then the two others. 

It looks like your default space permission does not include confluence-admins (or the group you use for Confluence admins) or it doesn't give the group admin permissions, and that is why you cannot manage the space permissions.

So your only option is to find out who is admin of the space and have them add you or the Confluence admin group as admins.

[Tom Atkinson]

Thanks, Mikael. The space admin has tried unsuccessfully to grant space admin access to the user. Is there a way to expand the confluence-admin privileges to include space administration?

[Mikael Sandberg]

No, that can only be done if you are on Premium or Enterprise plans, which have access to bypass space settings for Confluence admins. 

Is the space admin getting an error message when trying to add new space admins? 

[Mikael Sandberg]

One workaround would be to create a new space and make sure that Confluence admins are space admins as well, either by changing the default space permissions, or add them to the space permissions when the space is created (I highly recommend the first option). You could then move the existing space to this new one.

[Tom Atkinson]

That did it! I used this article to "Recover Permissions" for the space. It seems that somehow even though the default permissions for site-admins was set correctly, the permission for that space had somehow been revoked and I had to recover access.

Thanks for timely and clear directions - this has been plaguing us for weeks!!

https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf59/assign-space-permissions-792498609.html

[mike.mcgraw]

This is a bit old but I wanted to say this thread did the trick for me as well - I followed Tom's link to the article and had to "Recover permissions" from the Confluence Settings.

At the time of this typing, the Space permissions is also in a slightly different location under Confluence settings than indicated in the above article: