Anchors break randomly

Question

I manage a large Confluence Cloud knowledge base - 1,200 pages totalling 1.3 million words. All created using the legacy editor, with cross-references and inter-page references making extensive use of anchors.

I'm currently reviewing some of the most popular pages for currency, broken external links etc. What I didn't expect to find is broken internal links. Lots of them. Invariably anchor links. It seems totally random except ... anchor links which are on password-protected pages generally still work. The same anchor links on the public-facing (anonymous access) version of the same page is generally broken.

I don't understand. The links definitely worked when they were first created - anything up to five years ago. But somewhere along the line they've just ... broken. Has anyone else experienced this? Is it connected with the anchor macro being deprecated in the fabric editor?

At the moment, my workaround is to simply remove the anchor links. With the fabric editor just around the corner, I'm reluctant to repair anchor links which are likely to break again. And linking to headings isn't available in the legacy editor.

Has anyone else encountered this? Any workarounds anyone can suggest?

RPT Admin · Answer

Hey @Diego thanks for the swift response. Unfortunately I can't access your first link.

The entire site has been created using the legacy editor (no plugins) on Confluence Cloud. The only exception is recent blog posts, where the fabric editor appears to be the only option. I'm not familiar with tinymce but I think that should be enough information to answer your question.

Diego_88dj6o · Answer

Hello @RPT Admin ! By reading your description of the issue, I was led to believe that we might be facing the issue described here:

* [Confluence Cloud] Anchors are broken after migrating to new Editor

What happens is that when we use the new editor (Fabric) the page headers are different. So, if we have older links that are pre-migration to Fabric they will not work. At some point, we were migrating existing pages to the new editing experience, but this changed. Here is an excerpt from one of our blog posts on the topic:

We will no longer be converting existing pages to the new experience - instead, you will only see the new experience when you create a new page.

Here you can check the whole post:

* [Atlassian Community] Changes to Confluence Editor release

Also, here you can check more details on what can and can not be converted to the new editing experience:

* [Confluence Cloud] Confluence Cloud Editor Roadmap

Could you clarify one thing for me? Are the pages to which the anchors point using tinyMCE or Fabric?

Let us hear from you! Looking forward to your reply.