Orphaned Space Locked Out
Asked by Jerry VRG:

Upon creating your very first Confluence space on the free plan the wizard will guide you through the setup with an example space which you can name and set the Key for.  

However, this space is setup without admin groups that you are part of or have access to, namely: Confluence Analytics (System), Former user, Chat Notifications  

So even though I'm site admin and can add myself to preset groups like site-admin \& administrators, I cannot add any users or groups to this space nor even see the manage permissions button, even though I supposedly am listed as its creator. So I'm now stuck with this space that I cannot manage and that has burned the project name \& key which I need.  

Note that when creating new blank spaces everything is setup fine and dandy and I can access and manage everything just fine. (as far as the free tier allows)


Answers:
author: Jerry VRG
body: The only solution to this is to upgrade to the standard plan so the recover space permissions option becomes available. Kinda sucks that free users are ff'ed on their first space with no option to resolve it, since support tickets are again only available to standard users, not free ones.


author: Shannon S
body: Hello Jeroen,

First of all, welcome to the Atlassian Community! It's nice to have you join us.

I realize that you resolved the issue by switching to the standard plan, and I did review your support ticket with us. However, I really want to find out why you were having this issue so no one else has to have the same problem.

First of all, I want to address the groups that you mentioned.

* Confluence Analytics (*System*)
* Former user
* Chat Notifications

These are individual users and aren't actually groups. In your **Global Permissions** settings, they are granted access only to create spaces, but have no other permissions:

![CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.21.40.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/86664iE0F75B8E5C31C819/image-dimensions/496x123?v=v2 "CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.21.40.png")

Your global permissions for your Free Site should look like this:

![CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.21.28.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/86665iE74434B320D8A109/image-dimensions/496x162?v=v2 "CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.21.28.png")

When you add a user to Confluence, it will add them to the confluence-users group by default in order to apply the Confluence license. If you also add someone to **administrators** , they will be a Confluence admin. Lastly, if you add them to **site-admins** on top of that, they will also be a site admin across your Cloud site.

When you create a new space in Confluence, it applies the default **Space Permissions**, which should look like this:

![CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.24.57.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/86666i806FCBA9D3369FFD/image-dimensions/498x138?v=v2 "CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.24.57.png")

According to the default permissions, that will give any licensed Confluence users access to the new space and permissions to administer it.

If you want to have a look at your current group setup, go to **Security \>** **Groups** . That will take you to [admin.atlassian.com](https://admin.atlassian.com) to manage your groups. In my case, when I go to that page, I have the following groups:

![CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.31.25.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/86667i4BC0B4421D0E9832/image-dimensions/497x221?v=v2 "CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.31.25.png")

From the same menu, you can click on **Product Access** to compare what I have below:

![CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.32.23.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/86668i4847DA13D4FF39B5/image-dimensions/250x180?v=v2 "CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.32.23.png") ![CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.32.34.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/86669i182FC90D2441C052/image-dimensions/250x104?v=v2 "CleanShot 2020-03-16 at 16.32.34.png")

If someone were to modify the permissions on the [admin.atlassian.com](https://admin.atlassian.com) side, they would not be able to modify the individual Confluence site permissions to match. This could potentially break the permissions on the Cloud Free account, either preventing access to the site in general, or individual spaces.

If you want to try and proceed, we can compare my examples with yours, and narrow down exactly which change affects the Free Plan permissions. Then we will be able to prevent other users from having the same issue.

Let me know what you think!

Shannon


Tags: confluence-cloud