b29aff13bd60 It's only been 20 years. Please, give them some time.

This can turn into a huge compliance issue if Space Admins have the ability to delete spaces. 

+1

+ 1

Hello,

It's important point for us. I think the best way is two account approve option to deleting a space.

Best Regards,

Mustafa

Hi,
it's important, that this feature is getting added in future.
Thank you,
Chris

Hello together, 

I am site and orga admin.

When I use my site admin rights a notification is send to the owner/creator of the page I access. That's ok and in my opinion mandatory.

BUT a space admin can access to ANY restricted page AND change the restrictions WITHOUT that any notification is sent! This is in my opinion a significant security and data protection leak.

At least I demand that there comes a notification that the space admin enter and/or removed restriction.

thanks, I somehow missed the workaround post. we are going to follow it though too.  appreciate the input.

@Karen.Mustain – brilliant workaround!

I'd update the description to include it myself, but I do not appear to have access.

LOL...well, you know, it has been 16 years 4 months (and counting) since I reported it.

-Tim

We chose to hide the option using custom CSS in our Global Stylesheet.

/* Hiding the Remove Space Option*/


[data-web-item-key=removespace] {


  visibility:hidden !important;


} 

A workaround has been added by Atlassian above in the description

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-customize-velocity-template-to-allow-only-a-confluence-administrator-to-delete-a-space-1044776928.html

In addition, if you use Scriptrunner for Confluence you could use a script fragment to hide an UI element.

https://scriptrunner.adaptavist.com/4.3.7/confluence/fragments/HideUIElement.html

Karen, can you please explain how you HID the delete space option?

+1 on this Request.  We have a very large instance of over 6K spaces.  Recently we had a space admin delete a space and the restoration of the space was tedious and very time consuming.  It was estimated to have cost thousands of dollars (in hours spent) to restore the space.

To ensure this does not happen again, we have hidden the delete space option completely.  If Confluence admins need to delete a space we use the direct URL. 

It would be very helpful if there was a configuration for this permission.

Definitely needed. A large organisation with many different space admins (like an editor role) should be able to restrict who can delete a space without also preventing managing watchers, page restrictions, look & feel, etc.

Please consider this request as it would be a big help to Confluence Administrators. Thanks,

Please consider this suggestion. We would like to have the possibility to disable the deletion of space by space admins. Last time, one of the space admins accidentally deleted a space, and we would like to be able to avoid this in the future.

@ Atlassian,

Request to act on this

 Solution which you already have on Jira should be applied for Confluence too.
In Jira there is no way a project admin can delete the project, would be great if the same can be brought into confluence as well.
Otherwise, Tool admins have to take more pain here when such accidental deletions happen by space admins.

There is no good reasoning for having this option in confluence.

+1

We are also operating a rather large platform with > 5k spaces, and it happens more often than expected that a space is mistakenly deleted. Actually, most users reach out to us when they intentionally want to delete their space, and most spaces which are deleted by space admins themselves are deleted by mistake. Restoration is tedious. Would make a nice configuration option to be able to prevent this.

A couple of months ago, we lost a space because a space admin wasn't paying attention to all of the warnings and said they thought that they were "deleting a page". It took us two weeks of labor and working with Premier Support to get the space back from an old backup and numerous attachments are still in flux. Having Delete Space being a global admin permission would have prevented this.

We have more than 6,000 spaces in our Data Center, so recovering a single space is not a trivial task. At our scale with Data Center only those with Confluence Administrator can create spaces. It should be trivial to simply make Delete Space require the Global "Confluence Administrator" permission.

Just lost a space due to a disgruntled employee deleting a space.

15 years was not long enough to implement this?

We agree with this suggestion. In short, we are making a request to consider alternative approaches to the function “Delete Space” in a space’s Permissions page.

We're currently running Confluence 6.2.3. We recently had a situation where one of the space admins for a team’s wiki space accidently deleted their space. We are aware of the huge warning that pops up when you attempt to delete a space, but in this case the user was multitasking, long story short, the space got deleted, and we were able to restore the space in a few days.

We don’t see the threat of accidently deleting and entire space to be a huge risk, but it has happened. And when it does happen, in our case, we must contact several groups and levels of authorization to recover the space from a recent DB backup. We are able to follow a process, and successfully get the space back.

Due to the risk of someone with space admin privileges irreversibly deleting a space, the Confluence support team would like to request a change to how the “Delete Space” function operates. We would also like to recommend some ideas on this function to reduce the risk.

Please allow us to suggest the following solutions:

1. Use the “two-man rule” approach to deleting a space. This is a control mechanism designed to achieve a high level of security for especially critical material or operations. Under this rule all access and actions require the presence of two authorized people at all times. That is, 2 Space Admins for a space must both agree with the space deletion before the deletion can proceed.
2. Remove the permission to “delete space” from the Space Admin, and add it to the Confluence admin roll. Space Admins would have to email our support team to request a space deletion, and would allow us to make other suggestions about how to deal with a space that is no longer needed, such as exporting and archiving the space for future use.
3. A 2nd and final warning (with brighter emphasis) after clicking the OK button on the “Delete space” screen. This might prevent admins from accidentally clicking OK without thinking or reading the initial warning.

 Thank you for your consideration.

 Chris

Confluence must restrict the ability so that space administrators cannot "delete" their spaces.   Unfortunately, this has happened and it is not something we can help resolve.

Either allow this to be restricted to just Confluence System Administrators or have this be a "soft" delete that Confluence System Administrators can restore (similar to how someone restores deleted pages). 

Defiantly a VOTE!

Space Admin should only change space content and configuration (such as look&feel, permissions etc.). System Admin should be the only one that can influence the System structure/directory. If there is an ability to define who can create spaces, there should be an ability to define who can delete spaces. The sooner the better, especially when there is no turning back.

Same problem here - I had already several clients who deleted their spaces by accident. It would be better if spaces can be deleted only by confluence administrators.

Considering there is the option in the Global Admin console to allow or restrict users to create spaces, this should be revisited so that the option to remove spaces can also be restricted to Administrators. For the 2nd time we have had a user with space admin access remove a space containing current information.

I voted for this issue too, but want to point out that allowing anyone to remove a space can cause a big degradation in performance if done during core business hours, I suppose because the ancestors table needs updates. We tell our folks not to do it then, but sometimes it happens.

We had one of our guys modify the spaceadminpanel.vmd file so that only Administrators can delete spaces.

    ## Start Change: April 2, 2009: Preventing space admin to delete space, modify mail accounts and do mailbox import

    #if ($params.get("selection") == "mailaccounts" || $params.get("selection") == "importmbox")
      	$helper.renderConfluenceMacro("{warning}Operation not Permitted!!!{warning}")
    #else 
    	#if ($params.get("selection") != "removespace"  || $permissionHelper.isConfluenceAdministrator($action.remoteUser)) 
    		$body
	#else
	    	$helper.renderConfluenceMacro("{include:globalwikiconfig:disable space deletion msg}")
	#end
    #end
	
    ## End Change: April 2, 2009: Preventing space admin to delete space, modify mail accounts and do mailbox import

Although this is a sensible feature request it is not a high priority for us to implement in the short term. Please keep on voting and commenting on the feature for future consideration.

If you're interested to know how we decide on which features to implement, please read this:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+and+Improvements

In earlier versions of Confuence (2.7, for example), the admin section plugin provided the ability to at least hide the "remove space" link (from all users).

In researching an issue for a customer, I found a workaround to disable the link in Confluence 2.10:

1. Navigate to the directory containing the exploded contents of the Confluence war file
2. Navigate to the WEB-INF/classes subdirectory under that directory
3. Extract the xml file that controls that behavior using a command like:

   jar xvf ../lib/confluence-2.10.1.jar  plugins/space-admin-sections.xml

4. Edit the file plugins/space-admin-sections.xml and comment out the section related to removing a space, as in:
   

   <!--                                                                                                                                          
       <web-item key="removespace" name="Remove Space" section="system.space.admin/spaceops" weight="30">                                            
           <label key="remove.space.name" />                                                                                                         
           <link>/spaces/removespace.action?key=$helper.spaceKey</link>                                                                          
           <icon height="16" width="16">                                                                                                             
               <link>/images/icons/del_space_16.gif</link>                                                                                           
           </icon>                                                                                                                                   
       </web-item>                                                                                                                                   
       -->
   

5. Restart confluence to pick up the change

The "Remove Space" link should now be hidden from all users.

Please note: When disabling the link using the controls provided in earlier versions of Confluence, the link was hidden, but still available. The same is true of this workaround. If a user with appropriate permissions knows the direct link to remove a space, they will still be able to do so.

Totally agree that being able to delete the space is not something the average space administrator should be able to access. It would be even more helpful if you could pick and choose which of the space administrators options a space owner has access to - in addition to not deleting the space which is major, being able to restrict who has access to Permissions. In many organizations, access is often done by a centralized team to ensure access is maintained properly.

A separate "Remove Space" permission would be tremendously helpful. I think there are valid use cases in which a person should be able to administer the aspects of a space, but not necessarily have the permission to delete it.

This also will decrease the probability of space administrators that are newer to Confluence accidentally deleting spaces before they understand what the function is for.

Thanks in advance for your time and attention.

-Mike

I agree this option would save alot of unnecessary headaches.

Daniel

Hey Tim,

apologies for not comment on this issue before. Be assured that we take notice, even though we don't always comment on it straight away.

I see your point regarding the space deletion permission. I'll discuss it with the other guys. However, votes on this ticket are always welcome to push it up in priority.

cheers,
Jens

At the very least, now that 1.3 is out and has more permissions than when this improvement was first proposed — it would be good if the permissions settings had the option to enable/disable "Space Remove" so I could disable it for space admins.

BTW – I realize there are thousnads of issues open, but it would be comforting if issues like this would get at least a comment from Atlassian in less than 6 months. If nothing else, tell the user it's "interesting, and we'll consider it if enough people vote for it" and then throw the issue into a "we saw it, but want more people to demand it before moving further" bin.

Cheers,
Tim