Change the Owner of a space or page in Confluence
Asked by Rebecca Hylek:

We have several Confluence spaces with pages created by people that are no longer with the organization. We'd like to change the owner or copy the page and save it with a new owner so restrictions, etc. can be removed. Is there a way to do this?

I'm a Jira Site Administrator, I'm allowed to access the space using the key however when I try to copy a page, I get the error "An error occurred. Please try again later."

Does anyone know 1. Why I'm unable to copy the page and 2. Is there someway to do this without copying the page?

This impacts several teams in our organization so any help will be appreciated!


Answers:
author: Aron Gombas _Midori_
body: In my opinion, the "creator" of a content should *never* be changed (cannot be and shouldn't be) as that would destroy the precise history of the content. It would make it possible to fake the original author, which is not acceptable.

"Owner" is not the same at the creator. Owner is the person who is responsible for the validity and accuracy of the information written to a page or a family of pages. Owner can be the creator, but if it is a page with a long lifecycle (like in your case), then it is probably someone else.

Confluence Cloud doesn't have a content owner concept. However, "owner" is a core concept in the [Better Content Archiving app](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/123/better-content-archiving-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) which implements complete lifecycle management for pages and blog posts. Obviously, lifecycle management requires knowing who is responsible for a given page.

For that reason, the app allows you to [select zero, one or more owners for a page](https://midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/documentation/manage-the-content-lifecycle/quick-actions#set-owner) or even for a page tree (where you set the owner(s) on a page and all its descendants will inherit it)! Of course, you don't need to copy the page or change the author to select owners. Owner is just an attribute of the original page.

Then, owner can be used for many interesting purposes:

1. It is displayed in the top of the page, so any page viewer can know who they are.
2. It can be used powerful querying! You can [use CQL searches](https://midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/documentation/content-status/search) to find contents:
   1. ...without an owner.
   2. ...with a specific owner,
   3. ...owned by you.
   4. ...with the owner selected by a specific user
   5. ...with the owner selected by you
   6. ...with the owner selected in time window (last month e.g.)
   7. etc.
3. You can also [set up custom notifications](https://midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/documentation/configure/notification-schemes#configure-email) and select the "content owners" role. For example, you can email the list of outdated pages to their original authors, last modifiers and the current owners!

This short animation shows selecting two owners for a page tree and activating email notifications:

![set-page-owner.gif](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/259802i775A5E65541B54ED/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "set-page-owner.gif")

*(Discl. this is a paid and supported app developed by my team.)*

comments: author: Ammy Woodbury
body: If what you say is true, they do a really bad job of communicating that:![2024-01-19_9-26-04.jpg](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/301519i4A009EE65BBF2F96/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "2024-01-19_9-26-04.jpg")


author: Denis Kronika
body: useless comment


author: Dave Mathijs
body: Hi [@Rebecca Hylek](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4797610) , first of all you need to be a **Confluence Administrator** to update/change/recover space and page permissions. You mention that you are a Jira Administrator.

Currently, it is not possible to change the creator/owner of a page in Cloud, see suggestion [CONFCLOUD-7247](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-7247)

Same for the space owner, although a Confluence Administrator can always change/add/delete space admins of a space.

comments: author: Rebecca Hylek
body: Thank you Dave, I am also a Confluence Administrator :). I should have said that, sorry.

I'll check out the link you shared and begin watching that suggestion.

I'll also check to see who the space owner is although I believe that was changed already by another Confluence Admin.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Confluence does not have a "page owner".

The person who created the page is the creator or "author", not the owner, and you should never change that because it destroys the information about who initially created the page, which in a lot of cases, is potentially illegal.

The "owner" of a page at the moment is effectively fixed as "whomever the "owners" of the containing space are" (which will mostly be the space admins)

comments: author: Rebecca Hylek
body: Thank you Nic, I appreciate the feedback and yes, I'm aware that the person that created the page is the "author". I simply used the word owner in my description.

In this situation, changing the owner is needed because the person is no longer with our organization however the work ongoing. I would assume, like Jira and other applications, the change would be tracked in an audit log should any potential issues arise in the future.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: The "owner" of a page is the space owners, not the author of a page. Again, Confluence does not have the concept of a page owner.

The author is tracked in the history, so you don't need to do anything extra to log it.


author: Nayeemuddin Khan
body: What the owner and Creator of the page means in my space ! Both are same person. While trying to update the Owner, it does not allow even though I am a site Admin.

![DevOps_owner.PNG](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/272573i5ADFC1C10BD01997/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "DevOps_owner.PNG")


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud