Public question and answers on confluence cloud
Asked by Nicholas Thorne:

My organisation is trying to build a public facing documentation space and a key part of that process is creating a question and answer functionality. We have set up questions for confluence with a couple of questions however we haven't been able to find the option to make the questions public. If anyone knows how we can do this or can suggest another solution that would be much appreciated.


Answers:
author: Shannon S
body: Hi Nicholas,

You can open up the questions to be viewed by Anonymous users, but you must have an account on Confluence in order to ask questions, answer questions, up vote answers, etc.

See [Confluence Questions Permissions](https://confluence.atlassian.com/questions/permissions-407724476.html) for more details on this and how to allow Anonymous users access to view questions.

If you want Anonymous users to be able to answer and ask questions, please vote for this feature request:

* [CONFSERVER-51768](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-51768)

I hope that helps but do let me know if you have any additional concerns.

Regards,

Shannon

comments: author: Nicholas Thorne
body: The documentation link states that "If someone has access to a space, they'll be able to view, ask, and interact with questions in that space." however even when I give anonymous users full access to our confluence site they are still unable to view the questions. Have I misinterpreted what this sentance means?


author: Shannon S
body: Hi Nicholas,

I interpret that as any user who has access to a space they can view, ask, and interact with questions. As "anonymous" permissions isn't a Confluence user, then they don't have permission to ask or answer questions.

I sent you the Server feature request earlier, but I wanted to also show you that we have the same feature requested for Cloud:

* [CONFCLOUD-51768](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-51768)

At this time it's not possible for a user not logged in to answer or ask questions.

I hope that clarifies, but let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Nicholas Thorne
body: Fair enough, hopefully this feature is added soon. Thanks for the help!


author: Shannon S
body: You're welcome, Nicholas.

Take care!

Shannon


author: Shannon S
body: Nicholas,

You may have seen my reply to Riikka earlier who says that anonymous viewing worked for questions but not for answers.

However, while I was testing the solution I gave you, I was not able to get anonymous users to even view the questions.

Could you let me know if you were successful, and if not, I will be reporting this as a bug.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Nicholas Thorne
body: I managed to get the questions visible by using the questions list macro, however, users were unable to visit the questions page itself (either for space or the global questions).


author: Shannon S
body: Thank you for confirming, Nicholas.

I looked into this a bit more, and it appears the change is due to the following infrastructure changes:

* [Functionality update and moving to our new Cloud infrastructure](https://confluence.atlassian.com/questionscloud/blog/2017/07/functionality-update-and-moving-to-our-new-cloud-infrastructure)

It does appear that they are removing the functionality for anonymous users completely, thus the reason they cannot interact with the questions in order to see the answer.

I am sorry to bring you this news, but I hope that it is clear for you. If you have any questions, please do let me know, and as always, you can send your feedback using the menu item in Cloud (when clicking on your avatar in the bottom left-hand corner of your instance).

Regards,

Shannon


author: Riikka Koponen
body: Hi Shannon and Nicholas,

We have a similar problem in our company. I manage to enable anonymous users to access the questions but they are unable to see the answers.

Is there any way the anonymous users are able to see the answers to the questions?

comments: author: Shannon S
body: Riikka,

Can you tell me what version of Confluence Questions you are using? Is it Cloud or Server?

In testing the instructions for [@Nicholas Thorne](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1177758) I found that actually it doesn't work anymore even though we had released the ability for anonymous users to view questions, so I think this might be a bug. I will report it soon but I was wondering if you have Questions on Cloud, how were you able to eventually get the users to view questions when not logged into Confluence? The general method is no longer working.

As for your users not being able to view Answers to Questions, once I know your Questions version I can also test this and report it if it's unintended.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Riikka Koponen
body: Hi Shannon,

My apologies for late reply. We are using Cloud.

Regards,

Riikka


author: Shannon S
body: Hi Riikka,

No worries; I was curious how you were able to get it to work because when I tested it on Cloud the anonymous users aren't able to access questions at all. Thomas followed up and said he was able to work around it by inserting the Questions List macro.

Despite the use of the Questions List macro, anonymous users will not be able to interact with questions, including viewing answers, [due to the infrastructure change that I mentioned above](Functionality update and moving to our new Cloud infrastructure).

I do hope that's clear but just let me know if you have any additional questions!

Regards,

Shannon


Tags: public

questions-for-confluence