3fc01777596f  kind reminder for this feature and +1 for this feature request.

Tracking ownership of documenation in a tool like confluence should be a basic feature.

especially that the feature is available in Confluence Cloud, ... should be faily easy to port it over to Data Center Edition.

Thanks for priorizing this. 

A user who adds a Team Calendar is notified of every change on that, even though they have turned off Auto Watch and DO NOT watch the calendar.  This seems to be the only solution.  Please advise or fix!!

This can only be solved by introducing an "owner" role. I do not want to misuse the CREATOR for that. Why should the one person who initially created a page, be the (only) one responsible with its further development? The creator is just the one who started the topic. This information can be helpful, but should not be over-interpreted. 

When I need a real owner in terms of knowledge management I have to define and manage such a role for myself. 

So no change of creator field needed! But it still would be nice to have a plain name available, even when a person has left the company.

Hi Team,

We also get regular requests from user to change the page ownership.
It will be great if we can do it easily.

Thanks

I have to agree with Saskia and the others. When a person has left the organization, it is not really helpful to see their name still on top of many pages as the creator of a page. It should be both possible to change that name and transfer ownership to another person. 

Having to resort to create a new page, then copying and pasting the content over and finally deleting the old page feels like being teleported back into the IT of the 90ies. And it gets near impossible if you want to do this to a page with plenty of subpages.

Changing the database is also not an option for people using the cloud hosted version of confluence.

So please do something. It can't be that hard to create a GUI to enable the users to change that database entry for all versions of confluence.

So dumb to see names of authors that left the organisation on important pages. Also people believe information is mine when I only assist in documentation. So I introduced "owner of a page", but that makes people shy to make changes. I am now changing this to 'editor-in-chief' on every page. Cumbersome administration, SO NOT AGILE. Can this be a changeable page property, by default the same as the creator? Or simply as most people ask, be able to change the author (without ugly db procs).

I have started to use the page properties macro which aloows me to make some sort of overview of 'pages owned by', but it is still an ugly workaround. (Try this @JonMcIntyre)

I can only support the words of @Glen Collins. Sometimes I have the suspicion that Atlassian keeps the backs of the addon developers free by denying basic functions in order to maintain their business model. This is fine in principle, but with such core functions, these should be covered by the basic product.

This should be reviewed again. Being the admin of my companies server every time an employee leaves I end up having to create a local user with the users names so the content can have an owner. I'd rather prefer to change it to admin or someone else I designate as the content owner which would usually be a team member of the departed employee. We don't store any users in the confluence DB (with the exception of the deleted users I create) so when their account gets disabled in AD, it gets deleted in confluence.

Atlassian has always said they don't support the database manipulation that's offered as a solution in the forums. Why not just have it part of the page properties as a link since you know exactly how to change the data on the backend? I mean a simple link for the author, click on it and bring up a search box to allow to search for an existing user in the system and select that user and manipulate the data as you should be.

I  see this has been going on for so many years why not just do it and get it over with. This should be a core of the system and not part of a solution we have to purchase from another vendor.

I agree that creator should be left alone, and a separate way of storing a page owner should be made.

The comment from Atlassian says to use an info macro as a workaround.  I don't think that's adequate.  Can I put a user's name in an info macro so that it's searchable? 

I want a command to say "show me all pages owned by person X".   That way person X can invoke that command once a month to make sure all the pages they're responsible for are up-to-date.  I don't want person X to have to look through 900 pages for the 12 they're responsible for updating. 

The only workaround I can find to this is to add a task to every page to tell someone to keep the page updated, but this is clunky and visually annoying. 

You should reconsider this feature Atlassian. That this is something which requires significant attention only highlights the poorly designed infrastructure behind this product.

Any value attributed to a page should be negligible and mostly detached from the underlying table, this is database and DAG 101.

When the creator of the page is human or a well known automation bot that generates content, there is no compelling need to change the created by.  However, during the migration of an entire system to Confluence, having all the pages created by the bot makes no sense.  The inability for migration techniques to sustain the provenance of human user identity is a discrepancy.  The lack of an adminstrative action to adjust the created by user on migrated content is a discrepancy. By losing created by identity it demotivates users (the loss of provenance) to make that effort to migrate. While a user may be able to assert ownership (e.g. for all the content migrated to a personal space) for the majority of content that migrates to shared spaces the only recourse for alternative created by metadata is to use a "created-by-john-doe" label which is a hack.  I really hope a feature is provided.

Why is this gathering interest for Cloud but not being considered for Server? If it is added to Cloud, will this be changed? 

Whilst I agree that the creator is a statement of history and should not be changed (although there are circumstances where this is desirable - e.g. when importing pages from elsewhere) the concept of owner is far more critical. A system admin is likely to end up 'owning' most, if not all, space home pages (as they are required to create the space) whilst knowing little, if anything, about the content of any of them. They should NEVER be considered the owner of these pages, at very least they should be required to nominate an owner when creating the space. Also, ownership will, in most organisations, be a living concept that changes as personnel move around and confluence should be able to handle that in the same way that a house changes ownership over the years. We don't look to see who last decorated a room and consider that they suddenly own the house.

Oddly, I'm in agreement with Atlassian on this one. The creator of a page is a non-changing fact. Just because somebody leaves the company, dies, or is unlikable doesn't change the fact that they created a page.

The creator of a page is a different concept than the person who is responsible for managing the content of the page. Unfortunately, Atlassian focuses on the creator vs the owner and doesn't promote the concept of page ownership as much as they do page creatorship.

But, in their defense, even the concept of page ownership can be less than clear. A lot of content is co-owned or co-managed. That means it's probably best to let the customer decide on how they want to highlight content ownership (e.g. page properties macro, addon, or..??)

Outrageous that this is not being considered!

At very least someone needs to make an app that safely makes the change in the db - can't be that hard surely?

@Trent, @Hayk: happy Notion user here too

@Atlassian: please, make this happen - this isn't really hard, and a lot of your customers want to have it... easy pickings?

Notion. Loving it.

@Hayk - what product did you move to - interested now that confluence has turned into a pile of steaming turd.

I just want to chime in and say that we recently switched our entire company away from confluence to a tool that seems to have people working on it that care about the user experience. This 10 14 year old thread is one of my main justifications, aside from the night and day of using the products themselves.

Honestly, Confluence shouldn't even show the person who first created the page. It should show only who last edited it. Or the author(s) of the last three changes. That's what's actually relevant, not the person who made the initial draft four years ago.

I'm with Sean. And on the Cloud version. So database is not even an option.
Unless logging a call at Confluence of course.

Nathan: Part of my job involves writing these tickets, so at the very least I can show them to my managers when I finally decide I've had enough of this product and I need to show them why.

I speculate that part of the reason why Atlassian won't consider the simpler request is that, in their mind, 'creator == author' and it doesn't make sense to change the creator of a page. I could understand that reasoning, whether I agree with it or not. So the real problem, from my perspective, is that the creator (of the page) may or may not be the author (of the content) and Confluence should reflect that. Hence the ticket.

Debra: I'm not sure you'll get any help from Atlassian by posting here. I assume you've already clicked the 'Stop watching this issue' link at the top of the screen. Perhaps you also need to click the 'Remove vote for this issue' link? I'm not sure what Atlassian's policy is with respect to sending out notifications.

@Sean M: I think it's worth a shot.

Atlassian should have the resources available to come up with a better concept for page metadata and maybe putting it as a "fresh idea" two years after their last final statement is the way to go and it catches the eye of someone else who might now be responsible to handle ideas.

I upvoted your new request even though, we've already moved to Gitlab by now.
(But I'm still curious about when Atlassian will get their s**t together and finally implement this fairly simple but very important feature )

Can I be removed from this ticket? I'm not a watcher but I get notifications on it and it is a stale issue for me after these years.

Sean M: while I completely agree with your content in that other submission – we can't get Atlassian to acknowledge/consider a tiny "Update pages set creator=fred where pageid=123545" capability for this ---- and you're asking them to add an entirely new concept that distinguishes author and creator. I think that's a pipe dream.

This request is not being considered. Judging from the response at the top of the page, I think Atlassian doesn't quite understand the request.

I've created a new request where (i hope!) I have clearly stated the issue and suggested changes that would remedy it. If you're interested in this issue, please read over mine and vote for it if it applies to you.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-58228

I can't use the Content Report Table macro, because it misleads people into thinking that the creator of a page is the author. It would be a nice way to let people know who authored certain content, except Confluence doesn't let us specify that.

I wonder what other macro functionality is rendered useless (or worse, misleading) by this limitation.

Hi, we had a similar problem (who is responsible for the content; is it always the creator: no!), and created a (sorry, commercial) App, that defines clearly who is responsible for the content. Please have a look: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221028/page-gardener-companion-for-confluence?hosting=server&tab=overview. One interesting feature is that this responsibility can easily be defined for whole page hierarchies, so there is no need to define the responsible person on every confluence page.

I have been using Confluence for 5 years now. As a document controller I'm asked all the time for support.  Over the years I have helped various teams upload different documents into our system. I need to change the page creator to a member of those teams because my name is against them.

Years later people are approaching me thinking that those documents are owned by me.

Please add a new feature to allow the system administrators to change the page creators. It is highly frustrating that we can't do this already.

The update you made on February 2, 2018 about adding the page owners to each page is unrealistic. We have far too many documents to achieve this.

I feel within the last couple years a lot effort has been put into incorporating new features into the Cloud and Data Centre software. Customers using the Confluence Server software are missing out on those features and it makes us feel less valued as customers. Especially when we are being told our licence costs are increasing with very little features to show for it.

Don’t forget about your Confluence Server customers. We are just as important as your Cloud and Data Centre users. Please focus on some of the important features your customers have raised and voted on. I’ve seen far too many features and bug tickets become fast-tracked over those which have a bigger demand.

+1

My scenario: As an early employee of my company, I set up many of our internal wiki pages, but now there are more appropriate people who really should be their "owners". 

Plus, I continue to get notifications (within Confluence) that someone has edited a page I created and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn these off. 

Since they say they'll be reconsidering this eventually I'll put my use scenario here. We want to run a blog with posts from the leadership team of the company. Most of those people may be willing to email a blog post idea over to our communications person but probably aren't going to log in and post it. We want the communications person to be able to draft and publish a post but have permissions to specify the author as someone else.

Yes, I know I should get the leadership team to just use Confluence. But not everything in life is attainable.

This is why we need this feature:

Created by Unknown User (557058:cc5e32e0-5cc7-4003-930f-da385459b2d6), last modified on Sep 19, 2017
 
That looks awful as customer-facing content and makes Confluence look rickety and amateurish.

If an employee is tasked with migrating articles from an old wiki to Confluence, they do not become the author of the work they are migrating. And while the statement on the article's main page 'Created by so-and-so on whenever' may be technically correct (though misleading) if you look at the Page Information, it clearly states that the Author of the page is the employee tasked with migrating it, which in this use case is undeniably wrong. Why are you making it harder for me to migrate to Confluence?

You need to sort out your definition of 'Author.' Talk to a copyright lawyer if you need to.

• The author is not necessarily the page creator (you do not gain authorship of a work by reproducing it,)
• The author is not necessarily the page owner (the author could've left the company. That doesn't mean they're no longer the author)
• The author does necessarily need to be assignable so that Confluence doesn't assume that because someone is creating a page, they authored the contents of the page.

This is a major functional deficiency for a product whose ONE JOB is managing documents and your response shows a lack of understanding of what many people are trying to accomplish (granted, that's not always clear in these threads.)

Sorry for all the emphasis but this is incredibly frustrating. Now I will go plumb the database.

Thank you for re-considering.

+1. My organization struggles to get attract and onboard users. I want to show them what they could accomplish with Confluence, and a big part of that is showing them how they could share their content on the platform. 

I'm dumbfounded that this request isn't being considered.

Idem it could be nice to have this. Our use case is:

• Someone created diagram (via draw.io plugin)  that was inserted in page A (which I created)
• I renamed/moved the page A to B
• The very same person which created diagram is unable to do edit of these into page B because of ownership issue

Maybe this is not exactly the same probme but be able to change the owner of a page seems to do job (according to what I understood)  

I would also very much like this feature, thanks!

Sure i can do this but its not contemporary to stack "disabled" accounts. Didnt know why Atlassian does not support achiving it would be the best solution.

If there would be an option to only see active accounts in user management that could be a workaround but so i make it with every user whos gone more confusing.

Actually we have 40 Users inactiv and nearly 100 activ. Not that much but enough. Now i rename all lets say to ZZ00001, ZZ00001 and so on. I need to do this so that the user overview will sort them to the end of the list. But if i read articles in confluence it looks like ***** to see these kind of users behind the comments and pages they own.

It's not ideal but could you not:

1. rename the user to anonymous name
2. deactivate the account
3. remove any emails etc from the profile

Surely that would meet the GDPR requirements.

Deleting seems a really bad idea.

Hi,

now its time to make it possible to delete users without losing content. The DSGVO does not allow archiving personal Data for a long time. So need to delete users. Best would be a function where i can move all content from one user to a system archive user and then delete the user. So all information will be anonym in the system on one place and the can be deleted. Its no longer kind of nice to have it's a must have i our company should stay with your software. This problem affects all European firms. 

DSGVO: https://gdpr-info.eu/

You can give up hope of Atlassian implementing this feature, or any other feature that doesn't lead to new sales. I haven't seen ANY evidence that they are motivated to do things like this.

I am confused. SO you know people need it and based on that you are not implementing the change? 🙈 I have to deal with confluence pages that were created by ex-employees and as such I need to be able to give ownership to new employees. This seems a very simple functionality that should be there as standard.

@Jenny, ScriptRunner for Confluence offers this out of the box as a built-in script: 

https://scriptrunner.adaptavist.com/latest/confluence/builtin-scripts.html#_change_content_author

Hi all, 

Thank you for your votes and comments on this suggestion. I'm sorry we haven't provided you with an update in such a long time.

We understand that for many of you, there is a close correlation between author and page ownership. With that in mind, we unfortunately don’t see ourselves working on this issue within the near future, but do have a several workarounds for the issues you’ve described:

1. Displaying a page owner - we recommend using an info macro or table labelled “page owner” and tagging the relevant user. For more complex applications, Comala Workflows offers alternative solutions.
2. Deleting a previous employee's account (which is tied to existing pages) - we do not recommend you delete users from Confluence, as that would complicate your database (e.g. deletion of the user’s previous comments) but you can[ deactivate previous user accounts|https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/delete-or-disable-users-138318.html] for security purposes and still keep track of the pages they’ve worked on. Deactivating a user ensures they no longer count towards your license tier.
3. Redirecting notifications to the page owner - notifications are handled through watching the page. If you no longer want to receive notifications, you can unwatch the page and have the new page owner start watching it to receive the relevant notifications.
4. Finally, you can also change a page creator through the database. We recommend retaining an instance of your previous DB and doing this with a DBA present.

 We’ll be revisiting this suggestion in around a year, and reconsidering the request.

Best,

Jenny Millman | Product Manager, Confluence Server

Dhruti - I think the appropriate answer is in 2030. This issue has been running for 11 years now. 

Any date or fix version as to when this will be resolved?

Even with ScriptRunner for Confluence you can do this easily. I'm not sure why it's not implement in the main product

Whow another feature request running for 11 years straight! Happy anniversary !

I understand principle of "history never changes"

In our case, someone leaves, account removed from confluence and jira, all links refer to Jira in confluence can't work any longer!!!

At least, please add the owner role to application links per space/project !!!

This is a very basic need in a workplace with people coming and going - please fix this soon ..

+1

Atlassian really needs to listen to their customer requirements. This should be a basic feature.

How does a ticket such as CONFSERVER-45078 with only 30 votes and raised 10 months ago, take prioritisation over tickets pending in queue for over a decade with hundreds more votes.

That's pretty much what I've seen from Atlassian: this JIRA database has little to do with what they actually implement. It often doesn't make business sense to do these things. Atlassian is not going to sell more Confluence licenses by implementing a feature that lets you change the original author of a page, and very few existing customers would switch to another tool just because they can't change the author, so there's no money to be made by letting engineers spend any time on this.

Wow...given this request is over 10 years old, I hold no hope of it ever getting implemented.

Seriously, you all have known about this for AGES! Stop making other tickets and then asking people to vote again - just do some programming and make this happen! We all know we could execute a SQL command to do a mass update, so, sheesh as Picard says, "Make it so, Number 1" ...

So do we.

We need this functionality badly as well for all of the same reasons posted above.

as you changed the confluence ui, which presents now the creator with photo (in many cases not belonging to the staff anymore), we would like to have this feature. 

We're in no position to start messing with the Database so to have this option would be very helpful.