How can I prevent private confluence pages from showing up in JIRA?

[Helen Durrant]

I have some private pages in confluence that only I have view / edit access for. On these pages, I reference some Jira issues.

This causes my private pages to show up as links on the referenced Jira issues. This wouldn't be an issue if only I could see them - but it seems everyone can see them.

This seems like a bug to me. Is there some way to prevent this happening?

Thanks!

[james_morris]

I agree that this at least needs some sort of configuration workaround, because it can be a very common use-case. As a manager or any sort of leadership role, I should be able to have a private page in my personal confluence section where I can take notes regarding Jira tickets.

But if I do this, my "private" page shows up on all the tickets as Mentioned On. I should be able to hide my "private" page from those who don't have access so that there is no confusion in Jira. I have received countless "requests to access" from confused teammembers.

[Olive Sun]

Hi @Helen Durrant , did you find a solution to address this?

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Olive Sun , as discussed below, the user cannot access the actual  Content, but the issue in Jira will have the link. If you don't want the link there, then you simply should not use the Jira link within the page. You can certainly find a way to refer to the Jira issue without having a direct link.

[Julian Bourne]

This should definitely be a bug - the problem is that the link discloses the title of the confluence page, which otherwise wouldn't be visible to anyone.  So for example, we have a tightly controlled page titled "Security Lead Notepad".  With this feature operating the way it does, any JIRA referred to in there shows up with a link to that page.

That's a recipe for all kinds of inadvertent disclosures and is intuitively unexpected behavior - asking editors of confluence pages to be aware of it and "edit accordingly", is pretty risible.

I suppose we should retitle the page "Nothing to see here, look away" ... 

[Jack Brickey]

@[deleted], If your permissions are correctly set limiting the page only to you and others can access from Jira then that would IMO be a bug and you should reach out to Atlassian Support. Before doing so, you should ask another user to see if they can access in Confluence directly. If you are admin you could log in as them and test yourself. If they can access from Confluence then either permissions are incorrectly set or it is a bug.

[Helen Durrant]

Hi Jack,

Thanks for your reply. Permissions do seem to be set correctly in confluence - when other users attempt to access the page via the links in JIRA they cannot access it. I was first alerted to the fact other users could see the page links when I received a "request for access" email when someone was trying to access one of them via JIRA.

[Jack Brickey]

ok, hold on a sec. Are you saying that the user can actually access the restricted page or that they simply see the link in the Jira issue and when they click they are directed to some error/access message?

You cannot prevent the links from showing up in Jira AFAIK but they should not be able to see the contents of the page.

[Helen Durrant]

The second: they cannot access the content on confluence, which is correct and working as expected.

I don't want these links to show up in JIRA at all. To me it doesn't seem right that I can hide pages entirely on Confluence, but not be able to prevent them showing up in JIRA.

It seems as though this is not something I can change through configuration, so I'll try my luck with Atlassian support :)

[Deleted user]

Hi @Helen Durrant,

Confluence lets you can set view and edit restrictions at the page level, so you can keep your content as open, or closed, as you need.

This Add or Remove Page Restrictions page will help to set up the restriction on the page level.

Regards,

Gangavath Kishore Kumar.

[Helen Durrant]

Hi Gangavath,

Thanks for your answer - but what I'm saying is that I have restrictions in place - so it's hidden from other users on Confluence - but the links are still visible to everyone in JIRA.