Known limitations

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None of these are faults. They are limits and deliberate design decisions, listed plainly so you can plan around them rather than discover them halfway through a rollout.

#Caps and sizes

Thing

Limit

Members listed in a team

32

Reviewers taken from a Confluence group

30, picked by display name from the first 150 members in the group

Members of the built-in space team

16

Watchers per space

50

Label routing rules per space

50

Characters in a response comment

500, on the page, in Slack and in Microsoft Teams

Team name length

3 to 75 characters

Slack workspaces and Microsoft 365 organisations

One of each per Confluence site

A group with more than 30 usable members is cut to the first 30, and the team editor warns you when it notices. App and service accounts are never included. See Manage approval teams.

#Content types

Type

Support

Behaviour

Pages

FULL

Everything works.

Blog posts

PARTIAL

You can approve and respond, but editing does not reset the approval, and automatic approvals do not apply.

Live Docs

PARTIAL

The panel works, but Live Docs change without creating versions, so version and integrity checks are skipped.

Drafts

NONE

Approvals attach to published versions. An unpublished draft has no approval of its own.

#Page lifecycle

You do this

The approval

Move a page

Comes with it.

Copy a page

Is not copied. The copy starts clean.

Archive or delete a page

Goes with the page.

#Timing

  • Expiry is checked once an hour, so nothing happens exactly on the minute. See Expiry and re-approval.

  • Relative expiry, such as six months, only starts once an approval has been decided. A pending approval only ever expires on an exact date.

  • For roughly two minutes after a page edit, the status shows In review while the change settles.

  • Search and reporting can take a moment to catch up after a change. See Search and reporting.

  • The first Microsoft Teams message to somebody can take about a minute, while Capable adds its app for them. See Microsoft Teams.

#Things that are deliberately not available

  • Live updates between people. Two people looking at the same approval do not see each other's responses appear. Reload the page to see the latest.

  • A Confluence Automation action. Automatic approvals come from space settings, not from the Confluence automation engine. See Automatic approvals.

  • A public write API. Approval state can be read through Confluence content properties. There is no supported endpoint for creating or answering approvals. See Rovo and AI assistants.

  • Any Jira surface. Approval is Confluence only.

  • Choosing notifications event by event. Each person can switch email, Slack and Microsoft Teams on or off for themselves, but each switch covers every approval message on that channel. See Notifications.

  • Approving from Slack or Microsoft Teams in a space that requires a code. A chat button cannot collect a code, so those spaces answer on the page. See Sign approvals with a code.

  • Approving on somebody else's behalf. Not available to administrators, and not available to AI assistants.

#Things worth knowing before an audit

  • Administrative changes, such as turning the code requirement on or off and resetting an authenticator, are not in the approval history.

  • The CSV export does not mark which responses were signed with a code.

  • An approver can change their answer after completion, which recalculates the status. Both answers stay in the history.

  • Withdrawing an approval notifies nobody.

  • There are no backup codes for authenticators.

All of these are unpacked properly in Compliance and What is recorded.

#Migrating from another app

Approvals can be migrated from Approvals for Confluence by AppFox, and from the standalone Capable Approval app, with its full history. See Move from standalone Capable Approval. Other approval products are not currently covered. Talk to us about what you are moving from.

No surprises left. That is the whole list.