Public Site With Limited Access - Not Searchable On The Web But Available To Chosen "Public" Users

[Karl Burkum]

Is there a way to expose a Confluence space to the public but only have it visible by people that have the link? This might be better explained in an example.

Would like to expose some product documentation / Help via a public Confluence site. We would link to the site using a Help menu within our hosted web application. I would like only users of our application to have access to this content and not have it searchable to the public as a whole? The users that would have access would not be Confluence users and would not have a need to comment, edit, etc. in Confluence. They would only need view access.

The parallel example that I equate this to is a Picasa (Google) photo album. I can choose to make an album accessibel to the public, but only to people that have a special URL that gives them access, but not "the world."

Have others done this in some manner? Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

To clarify, our instance is an on-demand / hosted instance.

[Andrew Frayling · Accepted solution]

Hi Karl,

Appending ?os_username=<username>&os_password=<password> to the URL works on the downloaded version, so might work with OnDemand.

Andrew.

[Karl Burkum]

This works in the hosted environment too. Thanks for the thoughts / URL parameter!

[Nick Muldoon]

Hi Roger, Karl,

It's been a while since this question was asked, coming to the party late with a suggestion if you're using Confluence Cloud.

Instant Websites for Confluence Cloud enables you to publish a space to a public, static, and mobile responsive website. May be useful for your scenarios. We use it for product documentation as well.

Thanks, have a great day,
Nick 

[Karl Burkum]

Curious if it is possible to set up an account (one tick against our license quantity) and pass in the credentials in the URL? I realize the username and password would potentially be visible in the URL, but that account would have just "view" rights. Is this an option that could be considered - still keeping the content out of search engines?

[Roger Lee]

Karl, Were you able to figure this out? We were running into licensing issues in using a single read-only login to accomplish this (i.e. using a shared login). Thanks! -Roger

[Andrew Frayling]

Hi Karl,

I don't think this is possible with OnDemand. If you're able to apply Custom HTML or modify a Space Layout then you could add:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

to stop search engines indexing it, but as OnDemand uses a custom theme I believe you're restricted from making any changes to it.

You can make specific Spaces accessible to anonymous users so that users don't have to have accounts and count against your license, but the content would be public and could potentially be indexed.

Andrew.