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Frequent problems and solutions

Jobs and content processing

Content events (such as page views or page updates) are noticeably delayed.

In some Confluence Cloud environments, content events are delivered to apps with a significant delay. This means that actions triggered by page views, page updates, or similar events may appear to happen later than expected. For example, the last-viewed date of a page might not be updated promptly after someone visits it.

This is a platform-level limitation in Confluence Cloud and is tracked in Atlassian's public issue tracker: ECO-1403. Only Atlassian can improve the delivery speed of content events for all apps on the platform.

If you are affected by this issue, please vote for and comment on ECO-1403 to help Atlassian prioritise a fix.

Contents are not archived, but silently left in place.

As an additional symptom, you can also see less-than-expected count in the "Contents archived" audit log metric.

  • There is a technical issue. Open the "Logs" dialog for the job execution to see what problems may prevent the job from archiving. For most issues, you will see a link to the corresponding part of this troubleshooting guide to help you resolve the problem. If you are unable to resolve the issue, please contact our support.
  • You are trying to archive a blog post. Archiving blog posts is not supported by Confluence. (You can still use the "delete" automation action on blog posts.)

To fix it, verify and fix all the potential reasons above, then try again.

Technical problems in the job execution log

The following problems may appear in the job execution logs.

The job execution log contains paging errors for some spaces.

When the app processes content in a space, it runs CQL queries against the Atlassian REST API and iterates through the results page by page. In some cases, the API returns an unexpected error code for the first page of results or for a subsequent page, causing the job to log an error and fail.

This is not a bug in Better Content Archiving, the app is behaving correctly by detecting and reporting the problem. The root cause is a data inconsistency in your Confluence site: one or more published pages (with status CURRENT) have parent pages that are in DRAFT status. This is an invalid state that Confluence does not expect and that causes the REST API to fail when paging through the content of the affected space.

Next steps:

  1. Open a support ticket with Midori so we can confirm the likely root cause.
  2. We will then ask you to open a support ticket with Atlassian and share it with us.
  3. Once Atlassian resolves the data inconsistency, the paging errors should disappear and the job should process those spaces successfully.

As a workaround, you may also exclude the problematic spaces. This is not recommended as a long-term solution, but it can help you to get the app working while waiting for Atlassian to fix the underlying issue.

Failed to archive content.

You get this error when the app tries to archive content and fails to do it for any internal reason.

This can be a temporary issue that solves itself on the next run. If the issue persists, contact support to check the underlying problem.

Contents are skipped because they have children.

You get this warning when the CQL configured for an automation action would make the job process (archive, delete, purge) a content, but the content has children.

When content is removed from the page hierarchy, Confluence automatically moves its children up one level. To prevent unexpected hierarchy changes, the app blocks this behavior by default.

If you want to enable processing contents with children, do the following:

  1. Login to Confluence as administrator.
  2. Click Confluence Settings (cog icon "⚙" in the top right) → Apps → Better Content Archiving → Global settings.
  3. Enable the "Allow archiving, deleting, or purging content that has children" setting.
App user does not have archive permission in space.

You get this warning when you have an enabled archive automation action defined in your automation scheme, but the app user doesn't have archive permission in the space being processed.

Next steps:

  1. Login to Confluence as administrator.
  2. Click Confluence Settings (cog icon "⚙" in the top right) → Apps → Better Content Archiving → App space permissions.
  3. Set a correct role to the app user for the problematic spaces using the UI.
Archiving is not available in the free version of Confluence.

You get this warning when you have an enabled archive automation action defined in your automation scheme, but your site is using the free plan for Confluence.

Atlassian doesn't support archiving in the free plan. You need to upgrade to at least a standard plan to use this feature. (This is a limitation imposed by Confluence, not a limitation of the Better Content Archiving app.)

If you don't want to run archiving automation actions, you can disable them in your automation scheme:

  1. Login to Confluence as administrator.
  2. Click Confluence Settings (cog icon "⚙" in the top right) → Apps → Better Content Archiving → Automation configuration.
  3. Make sure that no automation scheme has an enabled automation action, either disable those actions or remove them.
App user does not have purge permission in space.

You get this warning when you have an enabled purge automation action defined in your automation scheme, but the app user doesn't have purge permission in the space being processed.

Next steps:

  1. Login to Confluence as administrator.
  2. Click Confluence Settings (cog icon "⚙" in the top right) → Apps → Better Content Archiving → App space permissions.
  3. Set a correct role to the app user for the problematic spaces using the UI.
Purge actions are not enabled on the site.

You get this warning when you have an enabled purge automation action defined in your automation scheme, but purge automations are disabled on your site.

Beware: Purge automation actions can result in permanent data loss if configured incorrectly, so the app blocks them by default. Before using this feature, make sure you fully understand the consequences and double-check that your automation schemes are configured properly!

If you don't want to run purge automations, you can prevent this warning by disabling them in your automation scheme:

  1. Login to Confluence as administrator.
  2. Click Confluence Settings (cog icon "⚙" in the top right) → Apps → Better Content Archiving → Automation configuration.
  3. Find the scheme used in the space where you got the warning.
  4. Edit the scheme, and disable (or remove) any purge automation actions.

If you want to run purge automations, you can enable them in the global settings:

  1. Login to Confluence as administrator.
  2. Click Confluence Settings (cog icon "⚙" in the top right) → Apps → Better Content Archiving → Global settings.
  3. Use the "Enable purge automation actions" toggle to enable purge actions globally on your site.
The number of contents exceeds the limit for the given CQL.

You get this warning when a notification scheme's configured CQL query returns too many contents to process.

Next steps:

  1. Login to Confluence as administrator.
  2. Click Confluence Settings (cog icon "⚙" in the top right) → Apps → Better Content Archiving → Notification configuration.
  3. Find the scheme used in the space where you got the warning.
  4. Check the preview for the configured CQL queries and modify them to return fewer contents.

Content status overview

On the "Content status overview" gadget, the "Contents" count is not equal to the sum of the status cell counts.

It is normal. The difference is caused by content restrictions used in the space.

Example: if you have 100 pages in a space, but one is restricted from the app user, then the app will not be able to refresh its status. In this case, the "Content" value will be 100 (the precise number of contents), but the sum of the status cell values will be 99. Also, the "Tracked" value will be 99%, the ratio between the two.

For a space to be tracked 100%, fix the content restrictions so that the app can access every content in the space.

On the "Content status overview" gadget, "Refresh needed" is shown at a space, but a refresh doesn't help.

This occurs when the app cannot refresh the status of the pages (and blog posts) in the space because of insufficient permissions.

To fix it, fix the access control settings, then re-run the "Refresh content status" job.

Setup and environment

The app is failing due to network restrictions that block access to required external URLs.

If your organization uses a firewall and requires URL whitelisting, please ensure the following addresses are allowed to ensure Better Content Archiving functions correctly:

Space icons are not visible in Firefox, a placeholder is displayed instead.

This is a known bug (ECO-303) that can only be fixed by Atlassian.

As a workaround, you can disable "Enhanced Tracking Protection" for your Confluence site in Firefox.

Questions?

Ask us any time.