Anonymous Users for Online Help Access

[Megan Stanage]

We are hoping to use Confluence as our online help tool for clients to access help pages as well as download documents. 

As far as setting up our account, it looks like we can limit it to a handful of "users" who will be editing the content, and then allow anonymous users to view the content without counting toward our monthly users.

Is this correct? And does anyone else have a similar setup? Thanks!

[repi · Accepted solution]

@Megan Stanage 

Yes, this procedure is possible.
Only users who log in personalized need a license.
Anonymous users do not need them.

However, there are no anonymous users in the free cloud version

[Marty Huppert]

Yes, we publish pages to an anonymous access space to provide online help.  We also use themes to limit the range of actions anonymous users can take.  See https://ccdsupport.com/confluence/display/help

[Megan Stanage]

Thanks, @Marty Huppert. Can you share the themes you use to limit actions?

We have our site set up but do not want the anonymous users to be able to: 

• Access page history
• Access page information
• View the Create button
• View the Home tab at the top that opens the dashboard
• Access the Dashboard
• View "Created by" info on each page
• Access the Inline comment button 

[Gautami Shetty]

@Megan Stanage ,

I wanted to check with you if you figured out the way to do it?

We are using up to 4 spaces for the same. 

Any leads would be much appreciated

[Megan Stanage]

We have most our site set to anonymous access and then lock a couple spaces down to a group of licensed users. This way we can share our external content with anyone who needs access to our help materials but we can also collaborate and work on drafts without worrying about anyone stumbling across those.

The dev team uses one of the spaces for sprint designs. We have a couple customized templates they work from and update as needed.

There are still lots of things that aren't ideal with making it a public site - there are not options to lock down other options we don't really want everyone to click through but there is a ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-30449

Unfortunately, it looks like that ticket has been out there for a while and Atlassian is not interested in making any changes at this time. :(

[Gautami Shetty]

Thanks so much @Megan Stanage , for your update. 

This helps me a lot. 

We can't change the way our site and instance works (too many moving parts), I have figured out an internal process to minimise the impacts on anonymous users when they access things like Page History. 

There's some apps to use to make anonymous access be more friendly - we are considering that for future. 

Its unfortunate about the ticket indeed. 

Thanks again.