Is there a way to prevent other editors in Confluence from changing the manual sort order back to alphabetical?
Asked by Sharon Russell:

We have applied a manual sort to our Confluence pages and we don't want other editors to be able to revert the sort back to alphabetical. Is there a permission that controls the ability to change the page sort order, or some way that we can disable that option?  
[](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Is-there-a-way-to-prevent-other-editors-in-Confluence-from/qaq-p/30554?attachment-id=5824){#link_1186abdd477822}  
[](/tnckb94959/attachments/tnckb94959/confluence-questions/5200/1/image2016-7-27%208%3A0%3A30.png){#display_1186abdd477822_0}


Answers:
author: Don Wallbaum
body: Forgive this sort-of related question. I posted this inquiry as a separate topic, but have received no responses, so I thought I would try here, since people are discussing the same general issue. If I am violating a standard, please forgive me and accept as my excuse that I am a newbie Confluence user, and I have not found the answer elsewhere.

I have inherited a page with more than 580 document links on it, sorted alphabetically. Many of these docs are now out of date and no longer relevant.

Is there a way to include a sub-ordering of the documents by update year? I would be happy with just about any solution, for example having a series of buttons with the YEAR indicated and by clicking that YEAR, such as 2015, the doc links would be resorted to display just those docs which were updated in 2015.

Doing a SEARCH by YEAR leads to chaos, since a year date an appear anywhere in these docs and not relevant to the update year.

Thank you for any thoughts!

comments: author: Giles B
body: I'm not totally sure I understand the scenario, Don. When you say you have a page with sorted links, do you mean there's a [children display macro](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ConfCloud/Children+Display+Macro) on the page (which displays the list of child pages)? Or another macro, like the [page properties report](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ConfCloud/Page+Properties+Report+Macro)?

If the child pages have a [page properties macro](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ConfCloud/Page+Properties+Macro) on them, or you put one on them, you can display the list of pages in a table using the [page properties report macro](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ConfCloud/Page+Properties+Report+Macro). It could contain the updated date and you could sort the table that way, but the page editor would need to manually update that date in the page properties.

With sorting of page trees, for display with the [children display macro](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ConfCloud/Children+Display+Macro), it's either manual or alphabetical. The only way to achieve a date-based sort would be to add the date---like 20160727---to the start of the page name, which isn't ideal, I'm sure.

If the links are on the page in the normal sense, where you paste a link on the page, Confluence has no way of sorting the content.


author: Don Wallbaum
body: Giles,

Thank you for your very lucid response. And I should have included a link to the page:

<http://confluence.hma.am.honda.com/display/RP/RMT+Features+Home>

You are correct, this is a page generated by a child display macro:

image2016-7-27 8:0:30.png

In my situation, a date sort would not be the best sort solution, so that rules out the need to add a date to the start of each filename. That is a good thing.

Would adding a custom label that includes the date be an option? I am not looking forward to adding a label to 500 pages, but that may be an option going forward. But as I read this again, your page properties macro is probably doing the same thing as a date label.

OK, you have given me a couple of ideas to putter with, thank you!

Don


author: Sharon Russell
body: Thanks Giles,

Do you know if there is a way to have Confluence notify you if someone changes the sort order within a space? Also, is there a way to see who changed the sort order?

comments: author: Giles B
body: Hi Sharon,

There's no way to do it using the UI, or any in-built Confluence functionality that I know of. I've never seen anything like that in the REST API either.


author: Giles Brunning
body: Hi Sharon,

Unfortunately, no, there's no permission that'll stop page editors from reordering pages. The best suggestion I can offer is to make a feature suggestion, [here](https://jira.atlassian.com/projects/CONF/).


Tags: confluence-administration