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What is a blacklisted space?

(since app version 5.0.0)

Generally speaking, every Confluence space benefits from content lifecycle tracking. There are situations, however, when it is better to blacklist some spaces, excluding those from content quality statistics, page view- and expiration tracking, and page archiving.

Blacklisted spaces will be completely ignored by the Better Content Archiving app.

Managing blacklisted spaces

The blacklist is empty by default, meaning that all spaces are tracked by default. You can add spaces to the blacklist at Confluence Administration → Archiving → Blacklisted Spaces.

We suggest blacklisting the following types of spaces:

  • Irrelevant spaces: these are the spaces that should not be tracked, because their status is just not relevant. These include dead content (legacy garbage), never-changing (static) content, machine-generated content, and other spaces that would create superfluous load on the server without creating real value for the users.
    For large Confluence instances, blacklisting these can make a big difference in terms of app performance!
  • Spaces with corrupt data: Confluence, apps and scripts sometimes create data that is considered corrupt. Corrupt data includes for example:
    • pages with NULL update dates (should never happen!)
    • child pages with NULL parents (may happen when your Confluence index is broken!)
    • dead attachments (existing in the database, but deleted from the filesystem)
    The app is designed to tolerate and report many of these problems, but it does not tolerate non-recoverable situations (ex: broken parent-child relations).
    If you identify a space with broken data, you should temporarily blacklist that until the data is fixed.

In this sense, properly configuring the blacklist is an optimization possibility. It both reduces the clutter in the application interface (ex: irrelevant spaces not polluting the content quality statistics) and the load on your server.

Questions?

Ask us any time.