How to identify owner of old sites

Question

We frequently have teams that work on SharePoint for awhile and create sites for specific purposes. Over time team memories fade. And often we will come across a site that we want to know who created it and who the owner is.

If we have site collection permissions or own the parent site we can go Site settings > Site permissions and look inside the owners group.

But is there away if you are just a regular user with only read permissions to find who created or owns the site?

I found this post it is about SP 2010, but has some suggestions like adding below to the address.

 _layouts/permsetup.aspx

That only works if you already have access to the site and could check the permissions directly through the interface.

So is there anyway a user with only read permission can figure out who the owner of a site is/was?

Answer 1

What I do is look in the SitePages library. If you're 'lucky' you can look at the created by date of the Home page or the 'How To Use This Library' page, if it was left in place. That might give you a clue if sites are created by actual people and not processes that might have a generic name.