Edit mode is incomplete

Question

I have a paper on Confluence that has multiple owners, so each section has a different author. When I view the page without editing, everything appears complete, but when I go into edit mode, only half of the content shows up. I need to resolve this as soon as possible since the deadline for this paper is April 29.

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Marina Francolin Janowitzer In addition to the advice from @Arkadiusz Wroblewski:

When you look at the page in View mode, does it say "Unpublished Changes" next to your profile picture at the top? In View mode, you see the last published version, but, when you go to Edit mode, you see the changes that people have made recently but haven't published yet. Maybe the authors have removed content and are not done adding in new content? You might want to check with them to make sure they haven't forgotten to finsih.

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hi @Marina Francolin Janowitzer

This definitely doesn't sound like a standard permissions problem since you can see the content perfectly in view mode.

The real giveaway is that discrepancy between view and edit; in Confluence Cloud, that usually points to an issue with the editor itself.

Likely a "legacy" page trying to play nice with the newer editor. View mode essentially shows you a "frozen" rendered version of the page, but edit mode has to load the live components, and if there's an unsupported macro or a conversion glitch, those parts can just fail to appear.

I’d start by checking the Version History to see if there was a specific point where the page was converted or where the content started disappearing in edit mode. If you can find a version from right before the layout broke, restoring it might be the fastest fix. You should also look for any legacy content macros that might be sitting in the sections that aren't showing up, as those are often the primary culprits in these types of editor conflicts.

Since you're on a tight deadline, I would also recommend making sure only one person is trying to edit the page at a time for now. Collaborative editing can get really unpredictable when you're dealing with older page formats or legacy macros. As a quick check, try opening the page in an incognito window just to rule out a browser cache issue, but my gut says this is a compatibility problem between the original content and the current Cloud editor.