SharePoint Permissions not working as designed

Question

I set up a SharePoint list yesterday, and needed to isolate the audience that is able to view items in the list. I went into the permission settings for the specific list I needed to change the settings for, and my options for managing the permissions were "Manage Parent" and "Stop Inheriting Permissions". I selected to Stop Inheriting Permissions because I wanted the permissions on the list to be different than the parent permissions. However when I changed the list permissions after stopping inheriting permissions - the permissions appeared to have changed across my entire sharepoint site. Why would this be? Now I've got to go through my entire site and my pages and redo the permissions.

Note: the permissions changed for "Team Site Members", "Team Site Owners", "Team Site Visitors" and "Viewers".

Answer 1

My guess is that you somehow wound up on the permissions page for the site instead of the list. This is an easy mistake to make, especially since the page where you change permissions for the list does not indicate which list you're on, nor is there anything obvious that displays whether you're even on a list or whether you're changing permissions for the site.

My advice is to keep your eye on the URL when working in SharePoint. The url for the permissions page for a list will be something like:

https://xyz.sharepoint.com/sites/site1/mylist/_layouts/....

Where the url for the permissions page for a site will be:

https://xyz.sharepoint.com/sites/site1/_layouts/.....

Answer 2

@Mike2500 has the correct answer. Here is a picture to help. Note the SITE permissions are circled in red, but the LIST permissions are circled in green. From a list, you can still easily click the site permission button.

And here is the new O-365 appearance:

Answer 3

You need to go to list stetting > Permission for this list. then click on "Stop Inheriting Permission" ribbon buttion to break permission. Click here for more details.