Why is my Confluence license limit was exceeded when I did not exceed the limit?

[LuziaL]

When Editing Wiki Pages (in this case, in the "Training Project"), the page cannot be saved due to a lack of licenses:

"""

This Confluence installation is not licensed for additional users

You have exceeded the maximum number of users for your license. You will still be able to view content, but in order to create or edit content, you must reduce the number of active users in the installation.

There are two ways to reduce the number of active users:

Disable users

Delete users

To disable or delete a user, visit the Manage Users page then search for their name. After following the appropriate link you can choose the 'Remove' or 'Disable' option.

"""

Although, we just have the right number of users on our Users group.

[Bruce Hoff · Accepted solution]

The application of Charles Miller's answer when using hosted Atlassian Studio is slightly different.

I asked Atlassian:

Luzia: Thanks for your quick reply... I do not see how to get to the mentioned "license page in the global administration section" in Atlassian Studio. I can get to the Adminstration page from the drop-down menu in the upper right corner. There's an "Account" page that tells me I have 46 developers of a max of 50. But I don't see a link or page called "License", nor do I see the described "refresh" button. Can you give me some more guidance? Thanks.

To which they responded:

You must access Administration > Wiki > Permissions and see Global Permissions.

You probably have set 'Can Use' rights to a group and have extra users in this group.

Let me know if you need further information and feel free to help our community with any further tips on the same link I sent you previously :)

[LuziaL]

Just to complete:

JIRA Studio will count all members of Users groups as a valid user.

Confluence, will count any user that has 'Can Use'. That's why you'll have an 'ok' from Studio but a 'too many users' from Confluence - they count users from different places.

To ifx the Confluence problem you must review all groups and individual users with 'Can Use' and regrant them accordingly.

[CharlesA]

Confluence counts all users who have "Use Confluence" permission to be a registered Confluence user, regardless of what groups they belong to. It could be that you have some users with that permission individually, or through being in some group other than the users group.

If you go to the license page in the global administration section, it will show you how many users are currently being counted towards your license, and display a warning if that number is over the licensed total. There is a "Refresh" button on the license admin page that forces Confluence to recalculate the user count directly from the database just in case you think it maybe caching an incorrect value.

My advice would be to:

1. Refresh the user count on the license admin page to make sure it's not just a bad cached value.
2. Check the global permissions to see who might have Use Confluence permission outside the Users group
3. Double-check the number of people in groups with Use Confluence permission through Confluence user management admin screens.

[Jim Butler]

I had an issue with this:   We authenticate to an IPA server, and I removed the confluence group from several users on the IPA server, lowering the amount of users in the group to under the 250 limit.  I resyncronized to the IPA server ( general administration, s "users and security" , User Directories, synchronize) which sync'd to the changes on the IPA server.  But Whoa!  i still had the error, so i finally figured out that I alson needed to refresh the licenses: 

down the menu, (administration, license details, "REFRESH") -

Using Confluence licensed for 250 users.

[Jose Ramirez]

Please put Charles Miller's answer at the top, as it addresses the issue exactly. The accepted answer shown is tangential to the question and addresses, 'Jira Studio', and not the question being asked, which is "Why when I was logged into confluence, did my rights get locked out from licenses being exceeded", to which the answer is, Confluence doesn't care when you logged in, it is counting all of the licenses issued, and locks out everyone when the cap hit is detected.