We should be able to display or not display what we need for our users, not what Atlassian deems necessary. Just being able to collapse would be good enough.

smansour - I agree with Ben. I know you all are trying to simplify Confluence and that's great but why not both? Why not an "advanced settings" section where options like this could be placed?

yes every user must press the collapse once, lack of feature here.

Thanks, Patrick. We've talked about this in the past as a team and we've concluded we won't be adding an option for this. Our primary reason is simplicity and we believe this is the majority use case. Confluence already has 100+ options which we are trying to simplify by ensuring we are catering for the majority of users. Given that all the user has to do is press the button to collapse it once, we felt that it does not warrant an option.

How about an option to have it collapsed by default or not?

Some discussion on how to do it with the doc theme: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/3308/how-can-i-hide-the-left-sidebar-on-some-pages-when-using-the-documentation-theme you could adapt that code for default theme.

Hi @smansour, thanks for the link but that explains how to globally disable the left bar, which doesn't make sense unless you customise everything.

What I need is to hide it only for one space (the site homepage). It could be the Documentation theme or the Default one.

Hi Adrian,
We don't have any plans on doing this as we see this as a core feature of Confluence. We hope to add more features to it and space navigation (children etc...) will all be on sidebar.

I don't recommend you do this as we will be adding more features to it, but if you have to there is some workarounds documented here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=330796984