Make a space public with anonymous access

Giving anonymous users access to your space lets you share the content in it externally with anyone who might need it, inside or outside your organization.

To learn more about anonymous access, what exactly an anonymous user is, what happens when anonymous users have access to your site, and how to enable it for your site, see Share your site externally with anonymous access.

When would anonymous access be useful?

Using anonymous access to share externally is best when you want to share a lot of content with nonspecific people (aka, anyone on the internet).

Examples of this kind of content could be:

• a publicly available roadmap

• an open knowledge base

• support documentation

Decide what anonymous users can access

Anonymous access to content can be controlled at different levels:

• Site – At the site level (in global permissions), the Confluence admin or site admin decides whether to grant anonymous users any access to the site.

• Space – If anonymous access is allowed at the site level, it’s then up to the space admins to decide whether they want to grant anonymous users any access to their space. If space access is granted, then anonymous users will have access to all content in the space, unless restricted on the content items themselves.

• Content – Anonymous users are restricted from viewing content when its General access setting is Restricted to specific people. Or when one of its parent items has been restricted, which means that view restriction inherits down to all of its nested items.

Give anonymous users access to your space

Spaces have their own level of control for anonymous users that can be controlled independently of whatever access is granted at the site level. Unlike logged-in users who get access to everything unless manually restricted, anonymous users start with no access and must be manually given access.

Although space permissions can be granted to anonymous users at any time, your Confluence admin may enforce site-level control over anonymous access:

• In new Confluence sites, site-level enforcement is enabled by default, meaning anonymous access must be enabled at the site level for anonymous users to successfully access any space.

• In old Confluence sites, space admins can grant anonymous access independently of the site-level setting. Confluence admins can change this by enabling Enforce site-level control. Control whether spaces can turn on anonymous access.

To give anonymous users space access:

1. Go to the space you want to make public.

2. Next to your space's name in the sidebar, select More actions (•••), then Space settings.

3. Open the Space access menuand select Anonymous access.

4. Select the toggle to enable Anonymous access.

5. Confirm your selection in the modal.

6. Go to Users in Space settings.

7. Review the default role (View only) applied to the Anonymous users user class, and update the role if you’d like to grant greater access to anonymous users.

Space admins and users who can allow and manage anonymous access in a space can grant anonymous users the default Viewer and Collaborator roles and any custom roles that do not include any space and user management permissions.

Restrict access to individual pages for anonymous users

If anonymous users are granted access to the space, they’ll have access to all open content within the space. To restrict them from accessing content, you can either change its restrictions or hide it from the content tree.

To restrict anonymous users from accessing content:

1. Open the Share dialog by selecting the lock icon on the content.

2. Select Restricted in the dropdown (if not already selected).

3. Add any licensed users, groups, and teams that should have access to the content.

4. Select Share to save the changes. Now, only the people and groups listed in the dialog have access to the content.