As of October 2023, Atlassian added a feature called Public Links as a way to let the general public have access to pages within an organization’s Confluence environment. This page is to inform Space Admins of best practices and considerations when deciding to turn pages public.
Per Atlassian: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/share-content-externally-with-public-links/
Public links allow teams to share individual Confluence pages with people outside of Confluence without giving them access to Confluence. This could be useful for sharing information to the public, like customer FAQs, release notes, shareholder letters, and more.
Most of our spaces by default require authentication and a paid license to Confluence. Public links remove this requirement, so they are a great way to share content with users in and outside of our organization, including parents, prospective students, and outside vendors. Public links are a way to include information on a page to share this information with outside users.
Per Atlassian: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/how-secure-are-public-links/
Public links ignore restrictions on who can view content in Confluence.
Normally, Confluence content obeys view restrictions inherited all of its higher-level containers — any parent page, the space, and the site itself. However, the public link will just work. Anyone on the internet who has the page’s public link can use it to view the safe, view-only version of the page (what we’ll call the public page).
Again, this means restricting a parent page won’t have any effect on who can view the public link of a child page.
This means that any page that is public will not inherit any permissions of the space or higher level pages. Any child pages under a public link will not be public. Public links must be explicitly granted on a per-page basis.
As of October 2023, ITS has turned on the public links feature for ucsdcollab.atlassian.net. That means any space admin has the ability to turn on public links for their space. By default, all spaces start with public links disabled, and if a space admin wants to enable pages to be public, they must turn on public links for their space. See “Allow Public Links in your Space” on this page https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/set-up-and-manage-public-links/ for more information on enabling public links.