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Confluence Cloud is slow, out of date, convoluted and noisy

Matt Goulet_ezhsus

The endless popup notifications that interrupt your flow. (Thank you, I know I renamed it. Thank you, I know I moved it. Thank you a gazillion times).

Confluence does not know what it is like to try to work quickly in their products. They designed it for a slow, old school audience. And it wasn't adopted by them, either, because of the same reasons. It works for no one.

This tool has so much potential, and it looks like the same is did 5 years ago. Just more features, nothing refined, nothing improved. Look at the settings page. Working with multple pages is insane, no realistic bulk actions.

Whoever uses this tool must use it, and is not using it by choice, I guantee you. I am one of them.

/endrant

Comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Well, there's one thing in there that's totally wrong, only a few weeks ago, we go https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Confluence-Mythbusters-Does-Atlassian-even-use-Confluence/ba-p/1805811

I'm going to question the "endless popup" too - I spent a good three hours writing in Confluence yesterday and the only pop-ups I got were the ones I'd asked for by inserting macros.

Curt Holley

But at least we know how @Matt Goulet really feels about Confluencee.

D'oh - Album on Imgur

Curt Holley

Honest questions @Matt Goulet
What is /would be your preferred content creation tool, if not Confluence?
If you could change one thing about Confluence, what would it be? (OK...you can have 2) 😀

Matt Goulet_ezhsus

To be honest, I didn't think my rant would be read; so many of these forums are idle. Apologies - I was frustrated. You know, if that wasn't obvious.

The short answer is of the 5 or so cloud-based wikis I did a trial run on (archbee, notion, , they are all fatally flawed, with Confluence being the least flawed. The killer with Confluence is the editing/organizing workflow. Here are some of my least favorite things that happen when I am working on several documents. Maybe there are better ways, I'm open to suggestions!

1. Editing a document reloads the entire page, hiding the page tree. This forces opening multiple tabs. When more then 4 tabs are trying to be opened in new tabs all at once, the brower goes into the red (each tab consumes 100mb). Even the original tab starts eating up resources. Why would you want to open 10 tabs at once? See item 2.

2. Cannot delete pages from page tree. Must open document to use menu. If deleting 20 pages, you have to open 20 pages to delete them. Archiving (which is available on page tree menu) is not desired in my case, nor is available without paid subscription. Again, the overhead on 10 tabs opening is crazy. Now imagine having to quickly delete 30 pages. Hasn't everyone had to delete 30 files from Finder before? Or 30 folders? Or 30 emails? Solutions like exporting the tree, updating in a doc, reuploading are offthe table. Same with moving multiple pages in the tree- you can't multi-select in the tree. Very common needs for me.

3. Check this workflow out. I click Create Page somewhere in the tree. It open a new window. I decide, nah, I don't need this. I click close. It closes the document, and returns me to a homepage for confluence. Not even inside the space itself anymore. So then I have to navigate back into the space, find where I was in the tree, and continue on. This is one of those d'oh! things. I think this happens in other scenarios, as well.

3. When creating a new page or editing one, the url given is not the document link. You have to publish it to view/copy a real url. If you're doing requirements, you generally copy/paste a link to the req in your components in figma and/or trello or whatever. So, I'll have to create a doc. Publish it, edit it again, just to copy the url. Small thing, but all these add up.

4. Since creating several new pages is time consuming, when using the primitive 'edit a doc, split by header' technique, all of the new pages are creating the 'old editor' and have to be upgraded. Each time you do it, you get the comment/rating pop up box asking for feedback. Which brings me to.

4. Popups and hovers litter the page tree. The need to turn off popup notifications for minor tasks like moving, renaming is important, especially when working at the bottom of the tree and it obscures your view. The hover-over for ever item in the page tree is distracting and unneccessary. If I'm working on 50 docs I just created, I don't need to see my face and name pop up on every hover. It totally obscures the document on the right side if your mouse stays over the item you just clicked on to view.

5. Creating new pages from within a page, I thought, was part of the wiki feature set. I'm editing a document and need to spin off a doc, I have to close out my document, create a new page, publish it, locate previous doc, edit it, paste link or use link shortcut. Preferred method would be to have a shortcut to create new doc when editing.

6. Unique filenames option. I actually don't want my document names in the title to or otherwise. Especially since page names change often. The url should use a GUID or whatever. All the old wikis did it this way, but not good for a documentation repo.

7. I wish the emojis were business related. There's nothing database or web related, tables, etc. I don't want to have to generate a png to tag all my content, but I also don't want to have to use "silly" icons for my technical content.

Please don't gang up on me about how my needs are not universal or important, even if you think that's the case. I know there are my own frustrations with the product, and I guess other people don't work the way I do.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Oh, you can still do point 5 in your list.

Confluence has always had a non-existant page function. Confluence fully supports "internal links" - links to other pages (even in other spaces) that you can create without urls, using the plain space and page name (this is something that couldn't work if page names were not unique within a space, and one of many reasons page names should be unique, as per point 6)

These referential links are better than a url because

If you rename or move a page, the links still point to the new name or location
They're done in human - not https://confluence/display/abc/my+page, but "abc:my page" (and if you leave off the space key. just using "my page", the link assumes "the same space the page I am on is in"
To your point 5 - you can create a non-existent link. Save the page, you'll see the link is highlighted in red, click on it, and it takes you to "create page" (or the draft if someone is already writing it)

On server/dc, and in the old Cloud editors, you could use simply

[a page i need to create] for a page in the current space
[ABC: a page I need to create] for a page in the ABC space

Unfortunately, Atlassian have messed this up in the new editor, you need to use

[a page i need to create]().
[ABC: a page I need to create]().

instead, which is obviously a lot more clunky. I know why they've done it that way, but it is a bit silly and they could, and should, go back to [] alone IMHO.

Matt Goulet_ezhsus

And for those who have said there are no notifications, this is what I mean. I drag/dropped a page into "Seach" page, so the popup opens, and it totally obscures the page tree item I just dropped it into. It forces me to close it to see/use the folder. Sometimes, there can be 2-3 outstanding notifications you have to clear first. These are the productivity killing things that hamper the tool.

Matt Goulet_ezhsus

I'm not following. I entered [This is a test]() and published page. It doesn't show as link, just text. Then I tried the 2nd way and same thing. So, not sure what you're referring to.

For unique names, I reject all claims that I should do it a certain way. That's why the tool doesn't work for everyone. I don't want unique names, and I don't want my page names in the url. Simple.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

That's why I said it was clunky - try it exactly as I wrote - with a period on the end.

>I don't want unique names, and I don't want my page names in the url

Actually, you do, and that's what most wikis do. It's one of their selling points.

Matt Goulet_ezhsus

Ha! See, that is the exact response that kills progress. No, I don't want my document titles in the url.

By the way, it did work when using a period at the end. Thank you so much! BUT, when you generate the new page, you can't change the title! This is what I'm talking about, the title should be editable. Documents whose keys are the name... this is like database 101.

Logi Helgu_oai8d7

Catchy title...I was interested...and should have been able to tell me that the vague title would include all sorts of stuff (just like a poorly written requirement But I learnt some things, so thx for the post

1. Stop multitasking
2. Agree (the delete all should be included and not premium)
3. Agree (really annoying...learn to know what your going to do before you do it)
4. See #1 or copy pages? (and the pop-ups (second #4 point)...agree, mix with #2 and archive a couple of pages and you have a "backlog" of notifications...would be good to disable them
5. Agree, (and Nic pointed out the solution)
6. Never thought about this
7. My grandmother was called Silly
(and for the URL I do like the fact that Confluence keeps track and points to the right place and I work around that

Matt Goulet_ezhsus

I'm not sure if that was a dig or not, but I'm just putting my personal opinion about a tool that has probably earned this company several millions of dollars which seems to be in a state of inertia for a long time. Bugs that were present when I tried to introduce the tool at the university I worked at are still there today about 4 years later. It's stuck in the mud. Partly because the existing community always rises up to defend its features, but what they fail to recognize that the one size fits all approach doesn't apply here. What works for one org does work for another.

In terms of multitasking, I think you misunderstood that one. The" feature" that I don't like is how Confluence does a full page reload, and hides the page tree in the process.

Nicole_lftadf

@Matt Goulet: You're definitely not wrong about the user experience lacking. I'm still using the legacy editor.

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