Discussion page for users affected by the editor change

[Tom Crowley]

Hi all, I'm starting a new thread after the previous one here (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Try-out-the-new-editing-experience/td-p/1000813) was closed by Atlassian so that they could contain and "action on the items raised by [the] group".

The discussion is for us to help each other cope with the rollout of the new editor, ask each other questions, pass on any updates that might otherwise be missed, and share our frustrations.

There is no guarantee Atlassian will pay attention to it, so it is not the best way to provide them feedback - continue to raise tickets as before, and link them here so anyone else using the forum can see them and we can put our weight behind it.

[Tom Crowley]

New navigation/home page updates coming 2019/2020: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/New-navigation-and-Home-are-coming-to-Confluence-Cloud/ba-p/1211418

[Shaun Sheehan]

We discovered yesterday that CQL is not working correctly in the new editor.  In doing a side-by-side comparison, our search using this CQL returned nearly 50% incorrect results with the new editor but were accurate using the old...

If you are using CQL, be sure to switch the the old experience.  If this impacts you, please upvote the existing ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67495. 

[Sharon Helms]

I believe the change to search is part of a project separate from the new editor -- that there's a different team responsible for search.

You might want to provide feedback on the following page as well, since the Atlassian team has asked for feedback and is responding to comments: Search like a pro with the new advanced search experience

Also note - they've indicated the option to switch to the old experience is going away very soon.

[James Dellow]

Its not just CQL - I also got differences in what it thinks within the last 24 hours is.

[Bruce Goett]

I seem to have lost the ability to put a border around images. Does anyone know if there's a way to turn it back on?

[Sharon Helms]

Hi @Bruce Goett 

The new Confluence editor has fewer options for images, and there's no longer the ability to add borders.

In case it's helpful, this new Confluence editor roadmap lists many of the "old" versus "new" capabilities, along with associated Jira issues where you can vote or add comments.

[Bruce Goett]

That will come in handy - thanks!

[Jj Smith]

nice!

[Tom Crowley]

Anyone had any issues with the "table of content zone" macro and emoji?

I've got the same set of steps twice in the same document. One is inside a TOC Zone, and one is not.

The custom emoji is not displayed correctly in the TOC Zone macro body. See images attached (the top/first one is the original, not inside the TOC Zone, the bottom/second is the exact same step pasted into the TOC Zone macro).

[Tom Crowley]

In the editor, it looks fine:

[Tom Crowley]

I don't understand this...

[Sharon Helms]

Published pages will also display blue stars instead of emoji (including custom emoji) if you use the “Include Page” macro, or if the page is viewed in mobile, or if it's viewed by anonymous users, or if your Confluence page is displayed through the Jira Service Desk customer portal. 

Since custom emoji are being suggested as a workaround to no longer being able to use inline images, it would be great to get some more comments from anyone who is affected. Here's a selection of the known issues with using emojis in the new editor:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-68520
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65481
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-64431
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67768
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-66871
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67662

[Tom Crowley]

Thanks Sharon!

[Tom Crowley]

#64431 (Emoji rendering to PDF) has been upgraded from "Low" to "Medium"

From the issue I raised:

"I do admit it looks like a mess and we understand your frustration. I am afraid that the power to change the priority is on product managers/developers' hands. What I've done for now was to contact developers so that we can have their attention on this case.

Having said that, our team is really working hard to clean this mess and ensure that we have a smooth transition to the new editor. We are actually conveying our customer's roadblocks internally to our developers in order for the pain points to be reduced."

I feel like Support are paying a heavy price for Product's sins!

[Mathias]

The fun part of this ticket in particular is, that it is a known problem since October 2018

[Helen Griffith]

Anyone else's Excerpt Include macros invisible in edit mode?!

We have had the new editor switched on :( ... I have found and reported about 10 issues; these may have been reported previously but I've not seen mention of the excerpt one before.

[Tom Crowley]

Yeah. I've not noticed it before, but just tested it. Not seeing any indication that it's there. It flashes up briefly when I open the page in edit mode, but that's it.

[Tom Crowley]

Include Page seems to be fine, but Include Excerpt is not fine.

[Shaun Sheehan]

Yes! I am (not) seeing it too. Do you have a ticket logged? 

[Helen Griffith]

@Shaun Sheehan no, not yet. I only noticed it this morning... I don't have much faith in bugs ever being fixed anyway!

[Shaun Sheehan]

I've actually found them to be responsive - even had a video call with 3 of their devs and they were genuinely interested in indentifying the what and why.  Not everything has gotten fixed on the perfect timeline, but if we let them know and enough people back it, it can gain traction.

[Shaun Sheehan]

@Helen Griffith  - if you do get one logged I will vote for it! 

[Helen Griffith]

Thanks @Shaun Sheehan - I will let you know. I logged a support request. I guess they'll create a ticket based on that.

[David King]

The problem our users have is that excerpts used to give the option of displaying inline or block. Now everything is forced to block and the 'edit' button only gives the ability to hide the excerpt. Hard to tell if this is a bug or feature.

[Helen Griffith]

Hi @Shaun Sheehan , @David King , @Tom Crowley ,

Please can you vote here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-68526

[Rory Apperson]

I'm going to paste this here from the "What's New..." article so it gets some more attention:

How about how they severely crippled your ability to insert links to other pages?  You can now only easily insert links for pages you "recently visited" which for me is a small, small percentage.  What used to be easily accomplished by hitting Ctrl + k and searching by label, title, or content in a convenient interface is now only possible by opening a new tab, going to the main search area, locating the page, copying the link, going back to the other tab, pasting the link, and setting it's link text.  Oh, and there's a bug when the link gets created where it doesn't take your link text, it chooses its own.  You have to edit it again to make it uses your preferred link text.

Oh and if you want to easily create that link again next time?  Copying the link as I described above is not good enough!  Make sure to actually browse to that page so it will show up in your "recently visited" list.  Please don't expect that to be ready in the list, though, if you go back to the tab where you were editing!  No, you have to close all your browser windows and open a new one and go back into Confluence before you can do that, silly!

Please vote for this issue!  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65363

[Helen Griffith]

I wish I could vote for the issue multiple times! This is a HUGE problem... I guess Atlassian might suggest that we use hardcoded or absolute links but this wouldn't work for us at all.

[Paula Cristina Vaz]

The new editor experience is driving me crazy. 

Why did atlassian did this? It makes no sense. 

What's the purpose?

The new editor is missing a lot of functionality that we had in the old and is forcing me to copy pages in the old version to create new ones.

[Tom Crowley]

Discussion on the Div macro removal continues here, for anyone affected or interested: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65774

[Tom Crowley]

The comments update in the November release looks like it's just the rolling out of the new editor to the comments field, right? (I'm not posting on the Nov Updates page because it's all gone to hell in a handbasket and I'm not sure how welcome I am over there now.)

[Tom Crowley]

They're touting it as having added the ability to use emoji, code blocks, etc, but it's the first time I've noticed the comment toolbar look like the new editor one, so I'm guessing they're just spinning out what could be a single release note: 

The Fabric editor is now used in page comments.

Unless there's something about inline comments I've not had enabled yet, and actually, the comments feature has used the new editor for a while.

[Tom Crowley]

Oh no, it's a stripped down version of the new editor, I see.

[Tom Crowley]

Interesting they didn't try to sell it as much, though.

[Alberto Buritica]

Hello everyone,

Is everyone having this problem or only a few people?

In the new editor the include macros (page/excerpt) are completely broken and buggy.

Example:

This happens when is included:

The macro is breaking all the formats, with everything that is included, no only tables like my example, break layouts, images, emojis, an a long etc.

This was the Atlassian solution when we ask for support: "copy the page and edit the content separately for each team you wish to view the material." Of course, the solution is ludicrous because I should edit more than 300 pages and maintain them when something change instead to only change one page (page which is a small part of the 300 pages) like I could do with the old editor.

I would like some help and at least confirming if this is happening to everyone. I don't know what I should do because they set the priority of this problem like "a cosmetic problem" (low priority) but I think is a huge problem for everyone.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67960 

By the way I checked yesterday the Confluence server version (the trial version that everybody could download and install) and it was a surprise for me the fact that the new editor isn't there. Why the Confluence Cloud users have been used like beta tester of the new editor?

[Tom Crowley]

Emojis is a known issue, see higher up for Sharon Helms' list of emoji-related tickets.

Is the excerpt from an old-editor page you are trying to include in a new editor page? Or is it new-to-new?

[Tom Crowley]

See Helen Griffiths' post for a current Excerpt Include bug, too. Not sure if that is related.

[Alberto Buritica]

Hi Tom, thanks again for you answer.

I ran the test in this way (a week ago):

1. I created a new Space (to go clean, happens also in old spaces, previous to the new editor).

2. I created My page with the new editor.

3. I created My page included with the new editor and I added the include macro choosing My page (Page to include property: My page).

 This bug doesn't happen when we use the old editor.

Then old-editor page include in old-editor page, works fine.

New editor > new editor, fails .

New editor <> Old-editor, fails.

The include breaks all, images, tables, emojis...

[Bob Sovers]

@Alberto Buritica --- Your original link to https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67960 --- is resolving to "Example.com" ... Here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67960 is a link to your issue.

[Alberto Buritica]

Thank you Bob. I will fix it.

[Tom Crowley]

@Alberto Buriticá 

Your post and the replies seems to have disappeared. I ran a couple of brief tests in my instance, and found the same.

[Tom Crowley]

This janky comments system is unreliable as anything...

So this is what I got (include excerpt above, include page below). Interesting that the emoji failed two different ways

[Tom Crowley]

So in my include page test:

• The emoji was replaced by a star.
• The table is only as wide as the content.
• Cell colour changes are not carried through.

In my include excerpt test:

• The emoji was stripped out

See the attached image for a better comparison.

[Alex Fox]

Apparently Atlassian is banning people from this thread so exercise caution with any dissent.

[Kelvin A Hill]

@Alex Fox Censorship is in vogue right now. It's best to avoid mentioning any bugs.

[Andy Heinzer]

@Alex Fox No one has been banned for the comments on this thread.  Alberto's post was erroneously flagged as spam. This unfortunately tends to happen by the automated system that manages spam on this site, especially when a user edits their own post that contains links and images as Alberto did.  I have removed that message from the spam filter.  It does appear in this thread once again.

We welcome the feedback about changes such as those discussed here.  Everyone is more than welcome to express their own opinions be it dissent and/or frustration here.  We just ask that you keep it civil, amicable, and stay without our rules of engagement.

Thanks

[Tom Crowley]

@Bob Sovers Did you ever hear back from the Contact the CEOs form? I submitted one just now.

[Bob Sovers]

Nope, just the standard "Here's your ticket" email.  Isn't there a stand-up comedy act similar to that?

[Bob Sovers]

I just went into the Atlassian ticket system, and I see this response:

Michael Lukenbill

31/Oct/19 5:17 PM

Hi Bob,

Thank you for reaching out and providing such thorough feedback. I read through your ticket and see where you are coming from and how impactful the points you made could be for your team. With the development of our Cloud solutions being a top company priority, the feedback here is especially valuable and I'm sorry you were made to feel like your voice on these concerns didn't matter.

I want to emphasize that we invest heavily into making the Atlassian Community a worthwhile resource for support and feedback. We are in close contact with our product owners, and have internal processes to voice customer feedback. I am going to look through the thread you linked and include feedback noted there in this ticket, along with the thoughts you sent our way, and make sure they are sent to our Confluence and Jira teams.

Thanks again for taking the time to send that feedback our way. While I can't provide tracking on suggestions moving internally, there are a couple of places to stay updated on the latest changes to Confluence Cloud:
Confluence Cloud Blog
Jira Software Cloud Blog
Confluence Cloud Feature Suggestions and Jira Software Feature Suggestions - Tickets for open suggestions are found here. You can browse open tickets, upvote, and comment.

I know I haven't provided instant solutions to the questions you raised in your original ticket, but hopefully I've provided some insight into how I can help your thoughts move along internally, and given you some assurance that Atlassian does take feedback seriously. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Michael
Atlassian

[Tom Crowley]

I guess we'll see...

[Bob Sovers]

I can't find the Contact the CEOs form anymore.  I guess that we publicized it too much!  If you have the link please post it in a comment.

When I went to my CEO-5702... issue, and click the "Feedback for the Founders" breadcrumb, I get   "We are no longer accepting support requests through this portal..."

[Bob Sovers]

Here: https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos is the link to the "Feedback for the Founders" form.

[Kelvin A Hill]

@Andy Heinzer Thank you for posting: "We welcome the feedback about changes such as those discussed here.  Everyone is more than welcome to express their own opinions be it dissent and/or frustration here."

That's a relief because I am super-frustrated by the beta editor (I'll call it that because it definitely isn't of production quality). I am enraged by its astonishing reduction in the very features that made its predecessor worth adopting—and the ease with which I am able to run into bugs. It shouldn't be so simple for a user to run up against so many bugs in a production release.

Is it possible that someone introduced it by accident, and you all laughed nervously, shrugged your shoulders, and said, "OK, whatevz, let's run with it."

Right now, I am beside myself with annoyance for what was previously a simple task of inserting an image at a required size in precisely the position I need. The control over image placement has been almost entirely removed and there are a ton of bugs associated with images being inexplicably rendered in hopelessly unprofessional ways.

I am frustrated. I am annoyed. I am disappointed. I am furious. I am angry. I am contemptuous. I am enraged. I am spitting feathers. I am cross. I am riled. I am irate. I am livid. I am rankled. I am incensed. I am indignant. I am fuming. I am apoplectic. I am outraged. I am full of wrath.

Those are my expressions of dissent. Enjoy.

[Rory Apperson]

I know this sounds dramatic, but I'm literally (the traditional definition) the angriest I've ever been over defects in a piece of software I rely on for my job.  The next one is a distant second.  I surprise myself at how angry I could become over something like this; it is an entirely new type of anger for me.

Please will someone tell me why you have done this?  Why have you made these awful changes?  @Andy Heinzer Can you please shed some light on this? 

Why would you make it so I can't easily insert links to pages?  You have the notion of "labels" to help in searching, so why can't I type labels and find pages when I'm inserting a link?

Why can't I insert a file as a link, or even directly where the cursor is (all inserted files go to the bottom of the document)?

Why can't I insert a traditional link all the time, instead getting a tacky, bubbly, unprofessional looking box? 

Why are there so many bugs?  Don't you guys test your software before you deploy it?

Please, I'm begging you; please help me understand.

[David King]

I think our company is going on 15 years of using Confluence, for much of that time using Confluence Server and more recently converting to Cloud. Part of our rationale for moving to Cloud was that we tended to do very slow updates of Server, and we wanted users to get access to newer features and bug fixes. With the recent updates to Cloud, I am definitely having a "watch what you wish for" moment.

The day the new editor became available, I started getting a steady stream of internal questions and complaints. We immediately advised users to create new content with the old editor, although I've noticed a few users must have missed the memo. <sigh>

In the meantime, we are looking to move our content, because Atlassian appears to not recognize the degradation in their product, and the only remedy they offer is to have users 'vote' on  individual bugs and removed features. We think we've found a solution that will work for us, so Atlassian is likely to lose a long-time customer.

[Rory Apperson]

@David we are in a very similar boat.  I've been using Confluence for 13 years and enjoyed the server version for much of that, only switching about a year ago.  I'm really mourning the downfall of such a great product.  It's been such a major part of my daily life for a decade and a half.

[Kelvin A Hill]

If Atlassian had any respect for its customers...

• It would retain the fully featured editor until the new editor was sufficiently developed to allow existing customers to migrate elegantly and without loss of long-established core functionality on which they rely.
• It would work closely with customers who have complex needs, which cannot easily be met in the new framework, to reach satisfactory workarounds.
• It would select a few heavy-duty customers to be early adopters while ironing out the teething problems—before finally releasing a stable, mature product into the wild.

Where is your respect, Atlassian?

[Bob Sovers]

@Rory Apperson -- Have you sent anything directly the Atlassian CEO's.

Here: https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos is the link.

Please let us all know if this gets you anywhere.

[Bob Sovers]

Hey everyone, @Avinoam has published a new article "https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/How-we-roll-out-the-new-editor-in-Confluence/ba-p/1204966

It allows actual comments to be posted.  Maybe that is the best venue for active discussions.

Alternatives:

• This discussion
• Filing a support ticket for each issue
• Enter a comment on the latest "https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-November-2019-Edition/ba-p/1225137" page
• I was also trying to find the link to the "Founders Feedback" page that is supposed to message the Atlassian CEOs, but that is apparently gone. -- Thanks Nicole... https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos is the link 

[Nicole]

This? https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

[Tom Crowley]

Thanks for the heads up Bob. That's probably the best place for comments for now at least. It's probably only a matter of time before the November 2019 comments get closed.

The CEOs link looks like it still works for me. I pulled even fewer punches in my message to them there, so am not expecting a response. (It was polite and not aggressive, but would probably have earned me a block on here!)

[Bob Sovers]

Thanks @Nicole --- I did a web-site search on atlassian.com for both "Founder" and "CEO" and could not find that link.

@Tom Crowley -- I guess that when Monique starts admonishing people for their opinions, we should redirect them there.

[Tom Crowley]

I find it incredible that they still don't know how they're going to deal with migrating old pages to the new editor when they contain incompatible features. Surely when they started culling old features like nested panels, div macros, inline images, you know the rest, they should have planned how each one was going to open in the new editor.

[Kelvin A Hill]

@Tom Crowley  It has been suggested that the new editor has been created separately from the ground up rather than cloning the old editor and culling features. That might explain the absence of key functionality. Rather than culling it, they haven't been bothered to re-code it for the new editor because (a) it was too complex and/or (b) they wanted to get rid and not support it.

[Tom Crowley]

Yeah, that's my understanding, which is why they can't just "put back" the old features we need. Anything that isn't currently in the pipeline will take a lot of time to get developed I suspect, even if they want to do it.

[Tom Crowley]

That's why I think the only thing they can do is to run them side-by-side until the new editor is up to speed. As well as the questionable choice of features to keep/discard, they released it a couple of years too early - which could be down to pressure from above or other stakeholders, which is why the Contact the CEOs could be a good idea.

[Rory Apperson]

@Kelvin A Hill 

Rather than culling it, they haven't been bothered to re-code it for the new editor because (a) it was too complex and/or (b) they wanted to get rid and not support it.

Or (c) they honestly didn't look over the list of features that the old editor had, and simply "forgot" features.

[Tom Crowley]

Ok, so my Feedback for the Founders made it as far as the "Product Manager for Media in Atlassian looking after images and attachments", who suggested a call. He's not who I was aiming for, but says he will record and share the conversation with the wider teams so I'll probably take him up on it. 

I think my aim now is to make the higher levels aware of how unsuitable the new editor is and to push for them to keep the old editor, at least until the new one meets the needs of everyone.

My feedback email should be linked below, if anyone wants to know what I said. It contains some nsfw language, which was interpreted as "honesty and candor"as I intended, and suggests that we might be able to understand each other. It wasn't seen as an attack, so I'm hoping for a blunt discussion if/when it happens.

https://gitlab.com/tomocrowley/public-facing-text-repository/raw/95e789e8bd91f1a77ace0a80acb0ff0374646450/feedback%20for%20the%20founders

[Kelvin A Hill]

I had a 30-minute call with Avinoam Zelenko (Confluence Cloud product manager) a couple of weeks ago. Other than his being very pleasant and sympathetic to our frustrations, the call was seemingly pointless. He "kindly" agreed to delay forcing us to use the unworkable editor until February. That was cold comfort.

[Tom Crowley]

Yeah, I was hoping for someone more in charge and directly linked to Cloud. I'm not sure whether the Product Team are under their own timescale or whether someone else is forcing the releases, but it seems like there's no convincing Avi and Jessica et al., so the best hope seems to be to get someone more senior to put the brakes on. Of course, that could just be p***ing into the wind too...

[Kelvin A Hill]

I needed to indent some text on Friday. That was when I noticed the indent option has been removed, and we are supposed to simply use TAB and SHIFT + TAB to indent and reverse indent.

That made me wonder about indenting in a table, since TAB simply makes the cursor jump to the next table cell.

I discovered it isn't possible to indent text in the following places:

• A table cell
• A layout section/panel
• An information/note/success/etc panel
• A task 

I'm not surprised about the last two, but the first two is a definite limitation. Should I even bother raising this as a bug? I simply have no confidence that such issues are even considered.

[Bob Sovers]

@Kelvin A Hill --- Without taking the time to file a bug for each issue that we find, Atlassian will continue to believe that their product is "perfect" or should I say "fixed". 

My opinion is that their product has been "fixed" in the same manner as when you take a pet to the vet to be "fixed".

[Dave Jennings]

Indenting tasks used to give nested task lists, something we used all the time. There's a ticket for it here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65755

[Viktor Zozuliak]

I had to come to this thread to find out how to indent in new editor...

Didn't know that shortcut for it existed, as contrary to other shortcuts it was never suggested in editor before:

[Bob Sovers]

I find it interesting that they are already removing features from the new fabric editor.

When it first came out they advertised that inline images could be inserted using a user-uploaded emoji.  However, a bug left that content unable to be exported to PDF, so they pulled the entire feature, even from the roadmap.

[Tom Crowley]

Good spot, didn't notice that. 

[Kelvin A Hill]

@Bob Sovers The CEO link is here: https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos?_ga=2.126276037.935229410.1574672509-303107152.1574164139

The first feedback should be to get a better razor.

[Kat Warner]

Not sure how the razor comment relates to the Confluence editor. O.o

Remember that this is a community and is part of many people's workplace. 

[Rory Apperson]

Have you all seen the company values page linked on the roadmap page?

Here's one gem:

Don’t #@!%
the customer

Customers are our lifeblood. Without happy customers, we’re doomed. So considering the customer perspective - collectively, not just a handful - comes first.

https://www.atlassian.com/company/values?_ga=2.27724092.1208619724.1574690952-1391914390.1566222896

[Bob Sovers]

Yes....  we must be the "handful" that get ignored, instead of the "collective"

Wait... isn't "the collective" the term used for the Borg from Star Trek: Next Generation! ... 

I guess that we should be a "collective" of mindless sheep, who just take what they are served.....   You will be assimiliated!

[Kat Warner]

Do you really think any changes made were done with malicious intent?

I see a lot of frustration here and a lot of it is valid however there is also a lot of unreasonable comments.

Your feedback is being read and will be passed on to relevant people. Some people have been given the opportunity to talk directly to the product manager and in focus groups. Atlassian continues to make posts open to comments.

Be realistic.

• Why should a CEO/founder get directly involved in something is team is already dealing with?
• How quickly do you expect changes to be made once feedback is given?
• Do you think snide comments and repeating the same feedback i multiple places will encourage the Atlassian team to engage with you?

The Cloud changes affect you personally - but the changes were not personal. The changes are in the product - but you need to engage positively with people if you want further changes.

[Kelvin A Hill]

Kat. You sound like the hen in the "eggs and bacon breakfast scenario." The hen is involved, but the pig is committed. Sadly, I am the pig.

The absence of functionality in the new editor impacts me in a fundamental and unacceptable way. The changes prevent me from delivering the very solutions my company engaged with Atlassian to deliver.

The reason why so many of us are being "unreasonable" is simple psychology. Our needs are being ignored. We wouldn't be so antagonistic if Atlassian were more considerate of those who keep it in business.

And why should we engage more positively? Atlassian isn't a charity. It is a commercial organisation that charges for services. Its customers have every right to express their frustrations in any way they deem appropriate.

[Tom Crowley]

Hi Kat, it doesn't matter what the intent was, it matters what the outcome is. I can't write documentation on intent.

I've been involved in those focus groups, but I still don't understand why users' needs are being disregarded (see the div macro - Atlassian accept that it is critical to some users, but are still not going to add it to the new editor). The team is not dealing with things in a way that is going to make the product do what we need it to.

Confluence is a big part of Atlassian's portfolio and they are continually pushing the move to Cloud, so yes, I think the CEOs have a vested interest in getting involved in the direction that CC is going, or at least understanding the ramifications of their organisational strategy.

And we know that changes are not going to happen quickly, which is why we've been campaigning for the old editor to be kept alive until we, the users, decide the new editor is good enough. And that feels like a decision that needs to be made at a higher level.

Realistic is expecting a company not to force you to move to a stripped-down and bug-ridden version of its product against your will.

[Tom Crowley]

Anyone else get that where every now and then they have to stop typing and wait for the editor to catch up?

[Rory Apperson]

This one I haven't experienced.  Did you try another browser?

[Tom Crowley]

Nah, this one is possibly just my laptop. It doesn't play ball all the time.

[Kelvin A Hill]

I do see this in large tables (dozens of rows). The latency is troubling. I figured it was associated with the delay I experience when opening a page for editing. For at least the first second, I see the previously saved version of a page. Maybe a second later, the page refreshes and displays the correct content.

When I move the focus to an empty cell and begin typing, it may take 10 seconds or so before the text begins to appear. It is disorienting, but I am far less concerned about a laggy product than I am about deliberately excluded functionality. That gets my attention every time.

And if anyone believes for a moment that Atlassian pays any attention to your requests for functionality when they don't align with Atlassian's own plans, consider the following request to implement what should be a ridiculously straightforward issue of renaming a user group: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1391

User group names should be a database text field with a corresponding numeric ID field being used as a key. Oops. They messed up the product, and this simple request is still being considered almost 17 years after it was first raised. Try thinking about the passing of 17 years in 21st-century business. I can't get my head around it.

[Tom Crowley]

Yeah, I was looking at that one after you linked it on JIRA. At one point they said they'd need to create a new platform to fix it I think. I'm guessing they ignored it when they rebooted Confluence and Jira and things this time around... Which indicates how closely they evaluated their backlog of bugs and requests.

[Tom Crowley]

Not sure if this is a new editor thing or not, but does anyone know of a way to enable a download button for individual attachments?

[Kelvin A Hill]

Definitely a new editor thing. In the old editor, it was easy enough to achieve pretty much any result you wanted. Now? Nothing.

If you were desperate, you could probably manage it using an IFRAME, but that would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

[Tom Crowley]

So another Tech Writer I know just shared these responses he got from querying his Premium Customer Support Rep.

Our current templates use the legacy editor. When and how will they be converted? Will we be able to use them after the migration? If not, what action do you recommend?

For both pages and templates, we do not have any ETA for the migration as we perform the rollout based on a batch of instances and many internal conditions like newly discovered bugs, or, features not ready can delay a specific time for the migration. Once they are migrated, if they have unsupported content, they will need to have it manually converted in order to not affect the creation of the pages and be able to properly edit it. If all the content is compatible with the new editor, when you edit the template, it will open everything that you had, but, this time, on the new editor.As a recommendation for situations like this one, it is better to have the content changed prior to the migration to the new editor, but, if it is migrated and you have a function for a template no longer working, feel free to reach out to us and we will work on the manual update of the content in order to allow you to continue using it.

What is a realistic deadline for rendering nested macros properly? Do you recommend removing them for the time being?

As of today, if a page is already on the new editor, it does not support the nested macros rendering. For Legacy pages, you can continue using it without issues, but, once those are converted, we will get a similar result from what we had in the beginning of this case. An important point is that if the application finds incompatible content when doing the migration, it will either point us that we have unsupported content or, not migrate the page in order to avoid data loss if we came in a scenario that the page would be inaccessible. I would suggest you only remove them prior to the migration because it would put you in the same situation, in which you would need to convert sooner or later. For the templates and the pages itself, by taking a look at the Roadmap page (https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html) or the macro removals one (https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/blog/2018/03/cleaning-up-the-macro-browser), you will be able to see what could be adapted as well.

What are the implications of using the Confluence REST API with pages converted to the new editing experiences and pages which still haven't? Can a script push incompatible content? How does Confluence react to that?

For publishing pages, we are currently experiencing a bug that avoids the page to be created with API in the new editor (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-68057). However, Confluence will reach in the same way for pages with the legacy or the new editor as long the content inserted respects the HTML interpretation for the macros/Confluence content, but, an important point is since we can manipulate all the data from a page using API, if you, for example, put nested macros in a page using the new editor, we will face the same incompatible situation from the beginning of this case, in opposition to the UI, that will not allow it to happen and will immediately place the macros separately.

[David King]

Hmm, so if I read this correctly, they are saying they cannot provide a time for any instance's migration, that migration will break anything not supported in by the new editor, and that it is up to the customer to manually fix content. So it's the customer's problem.

I have logged a support ticket asking for the rollout of the new editor to be delayed indefinitely. The response from the rep about 10 days ago was that he had escalated to the 'senior team'. I have gotten no update, other than that yesterday their system changed the ticket status to 'inactive' and the rep asked me if I had any updates or if he could close the ticket. I posted back that the ticket is awaiting a response from them.

I feel fortunate that we have not done heavy customization and our overall amount of content is merely hundreds of pages that are used internally. Users simply hate the new editor, and while some things will definitely break, they are not catastrophic. At the very least, I would expect to be able to get an ETA for continued rollout/migration, so that we can move our content, if we need to. Our preference is to stay with Confluence, but we have begun testing migration.

[Tom Crowley]

It's concerning to say the least.

[Tom Crowley]

Equally concerning is that it took someone with a Premium subscription to get this kind of information. 

[Tom Crowley]

I get the sense that the rollout is picking up steam. I seem to be seeing more posts on the Community asking where various features have gone or why they are broken. Roughly half of the people posting are "new here", suggesting that they, like me, joined the Community as a direct result of the unsuitability of the new editor.

@Monique vdB Some of the new features/removals in the new editor were specifically done to prevent users from breaking their pages and raising support tickets. How is your team provisioned to make sure that all the people coming here with queries get the answers they need? And how is the Product team supporting you (since it's their mess you're dealing with)?

This might be anecdotal, and maybe it has been a steady flow since the beginning, but here are some of the most recent (last week or so) posts. I think each of the topics has been raised before and discussed at length on one of these conversations, meaning that people are still not being told what is happening. Not all of these topics have responses.

• i am not able to use anchor macro any more
  more macros is not showing me anchor tab any more this is very important for documentation
• Unable to upload files in new editor
  In the new editor, when I try to use the Files & images macro, nothing happens. This is a new problem for us. Anyone else having this issue?
• placing a link to a previously uploaded file no longer possible?
  I started working with Confluence quite extensively, but in the last days something changed, so that I am no longer able to add a link to previously uploaded files. In the past, the [Ctrl+K] opened
• Import Word Document - looses images
  Hello, I'm using the "Import Word Document" function on Confluence Cloud for the first time. I'm familiar with the function, as I have used it multiple times on an outdated server-based Confluence
• Align file or image in table?
  Hello, I was happy working with Confluence in the past. The "new editing experience" appears awkward, dysfunctional and ugly to me. For example: currently I cannot change the alignment of images in...

• Images in comments broken or just badly designed?
  Recently the way images are embedded in comments has been changed, but it makes the usage very hard to use. You have no whatsoever influence over positioning, size etc anymore, do other confluence c...

• How do I create sections in Confluence Cloud
  When creating a new page in the updated version of Confluence Cloud I can't see an option to create a section and this is how we format our pages. Hi is there an update for when this feature will be...

[Tom Crowley]

@Avinoam / @Jessica Taylor I know you are just two of probably many PMs dealing with the new editor, so apologies for only tagging you, but please note the above. Users are still creating accounts to join the Community so they can ask where the features they use daily have gone.

Among my network of software professionals and technical writers, several of them are now mentioning that their Cloud instance has been switched over, with very little forewarning. As we discussed earlier, comments on here are only going to be taken to more public forums if things are not fixed, and this is what is happening. 

It seems like in spite of all of the comprehensive feedback we have given you, you've still gone ahead and forced the editor on people, even though it's not ready.

Communication also hasn't improved to the necessary point. People are still being blindsided by the change. This might be down to Atlassian admins in different companies not passing the information on, in which case you need to be making sure that the admins (who might not be content producers) understand that there are many fundamental changes here that are breaking peoples' wikis. Information about which features are there/not there must be passed on to the users, not just the admins. 

I'm now trying to pass information between two different networks to help people I've never met understand what's happening because the flow of information is not reaching the right people. As has been mentioned before, it feels like some of us are doing your jobs - and we might as well, because some of us can no longer do our own jobs.

[Tom Crowley]

@Kelvin A Hill My Feedback for the Founders email landed with the Product Manager for images and attachments, so I've sent him a link to your thread on the other page (and attached the comments as a Word doc in case it gets deleted before he reads it).

And it lasted what, half an hour? I definitely expected it to at least get to an hour before the name change!

[Kelvin A Hill]

@Tom Crowley I have decided to retire this account. Working with the new editor has turned me into an out-and-out troll. There are plenty more bugs I could report, but I can't be arsed. Shopkeepers who fight with their clients don't deserve to be in business.

[Tom Crowley]

Well, it's been a pleasure. I'm not sure there's anything more we can do, to be honest. Good luck with... whatever you end up doing to cope with this shambles!

[Deleted user]

Glad to see the back of him, @Tom Crowley. After all, Atlassian shouldn't have to justify itself to its customers. ;-)

[Tom Crowley]

Atlassian absolutely has to justify itself to its customers when it forces breaking changes on them. Kelvin's anger and frustration is completely understandable. It's not on me to pass judgement on how other users respond to a product they pay for being broken by the same company that provides it.

He protested so much because he cared about how the product worked. It's users like him that Atlassian should be listening to, not those who turn up to give single-sentence praise, or the blinkered hardcore fans trying to tell us that everything is going to be alright and trying to put Atlassian beyond reproach.

[Alex Fox]

FWIW I think Massimo was being facetious...

[Deleted user]

I understand your concerns @Tom Crowley, but Atlassian is a dog and the customers are the tail. The tail should not wag the dog.

It doesn't matter if the dog has fleas or the tail gets trapped in a door. The tail must never wag the dog. It is against the natural order of things.

I am very pleased with the new editor. I love the colours in the tables. I don't mind too much if nothing else functions, or if it half functions in a way that is surprising or makes no sense. Colours in tables are everything to me.

[Tom Crowley]

I spent all day trying to work out whether he was or not, and I still got it wrong... It's been one of those days.

Ah well, call it my obituary to a fellow angry user.

(And apologies @[deleted] if that was the case!)

[Tom Crowley]

Where is the :suspicious-face: emoji...?

[Dan Winkler]

@[deleted] I, too, really love colors in the tables. Very beautiful. But I'm a little disappointed that you didn't mention the emojis. Wow! What a great addition to the editor! 

🥰

To be honest, when I was thinking of new features that I'd love to see in Confluence, emojis weren't near the top of my list. Or near the bottom of my list. Or even on my list. Because, you know, they're really the province of Snapchat-loving teenagers, not adult, professional communicators. OR SO I THOUGHT! But after seeing them in action, I am a convert, and I try to incorporate an emoji in my pages every time I make an edit.

🙃

In all seriousness, I've spent way too much time and energy thinking about this and being increasingly disappointed by the editor, the way Atlassian rolled it out, and Atlassian's response to our frustrations.

And where I've finally landed on this situation, and what actually helps me a bit, is this realization: This editor isn't for us users, it's for Atlassian. I imagine it's easier to maintain and might lead to less bugs. Or, maybe it addresses a lot of technical debt. Or...well, I'm not sure what else it's meant to do for them.

So when they announced it, instead of trying to blow smoke up our *ss and eff the customers and BS us, they should have just said this:

Hey, listen folks - we're going to give you something that has a lot less functionality than what you had before. It definitely stinks, and it's going to cause a lot of you a lot of stress and rework, but the bottom line is that it's better for our company and we think that enough of you are so tied into Jira that it'll be really difficult for you to move off of Confluence. That's the business calculation we've made, and we think it'll pay off for us in the long run. So yes, we do understand that this new editor is much less useful than the old one, but too bad. It's a really good move for us.

I would have respected that a lot more than the phony nonsense coming from Atlassian about why they introduced this.

In the interest of trying to be fair, I've really tried to focus on the positives of the new editor. So far here's what I've got:

• The / shortcut key to open a macro is better. One click, easily accessed by my right pinky, rather than having to use two fingers and looking to see where the left curly bracket key is.
• Headings 3 through 5 are now relatively useful compared to what they were before.

And that's it. There's nothing else for me that's an improvement. Nothing at all.

[Shawn Connelly]

OMG, I couldn't agree more! 
I just discovered that I cannot copy content from a page created with the old editor to a page created with the new editor. 

Even more weird... pasting several times yields different results. The first few times, only plain text (missing panels, and notes macro, as well as icons). 

A few more tries and then I got plain text plus icons (but all at their maximum size), and no formatting retained. 

This is insanely unacceptable especially considering that the new editor is now the default!

[Tom Crowley]

Atlassian's year-end self-congratulatory post on the Cloud update: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/2019-All-Wrap-ped-Up-Like-a-Present/ba-p/1235288

[Tom Crowley]

Credit to them, it takes some bare-faced bravery to post something of that tone.

[Alex Fox]

Not sure if it's a user-specific option, but it let me add a tag to that post. If you can do it too and others can see it... what fun we could have.

[Alex Fox]

Forget that, the comments are open too!

[Tom Crowley]

I'm torn. I don't want to be childish, but I also do want to tag it with things like "Lump of coal" and "Naughty list"...

[Tom Crowley]

So far the most apt quote from a Christmas film I can think of for it is "Keep the change, ya filthy animal" from Home Alone.

[Alex Fox]

I have no such internal conflict and tagged it with 'garbage'. Remains to be seen if everyone can see the tags I add or if they are more a user preference type system.

[Alex Fox]

"And a Happy New Year!"

[Tom Crowley]

Nah, tags are visible!

[Deleted user]

I believe another user who was threatened with being blocked may already have added a sprinkling of "naughty" tags to some other threads. I stumbled upon them recently, but I won't share the page details here. We don't want Atlassian to notice after all. ;-)

[Tom Crowley]

I know that the team need to be able to positively evaluate what they've done in the past 12 months, but it is pretty offensive for them to take pride in the Cloud developments this year. There are no two ways about it: it's crap and it's broken a lot of people's sites. They say they're listening to our feedback, but they are still patting themselves on the back over it. I really don't understand how they're functioning here... 

[Tom Crowley]

Sod it. Here's the text of the whole email. Vomit at will...

Hi Atlassian Authors!

For December, we have two themes!

First, the Confluence Cloud team finished 2019 with a lot to be proud of, but that got us thinking…What projects did you accomplish with Confluence Cloud this year that you are most proud of? What contributions to Atlassian’s Community did you make that give you a glowing sense of pride? Wrap them up and tie them with a bow for all of us!

Our second theme (and not entirely unrelated), is to “show us” how you’ve created beautiful pages in Confluence. Take a screenshot of a gorgeous page you created in Confluence Cloud and share your tips and tricks for how you made it sparkle. We’re all nerds here, so beautiful Confluence pages to us mean elegant design, but also creative layouts that make complex information clear. Tables, macros, integrations are all welcome! Just remember not to share any proprietary company information so we can keep this exercise fun and stress-free.

We’re looking forward to reading and seeing what you’ve created this year using Confluence Cloud! As always, be sure to tag your Articles with #Atlassian-Authors so we can easily search + find your content. 

[Tom Crowley]

Bridget clearly does not do much managing on the Cloud side of the Community.

[Tom Crowley]

My apologies. I've only been visited by the ghost of Confluence Past and Confluence Present so far. Past was great, Present was not so much. I'm terrified by the ghost of Confluence Future. 

Humbug.

[Monique vdB]

@[deleted] and @Tom Crowley one sarcastic post and some quote marks removed. Bridget manages our authors program and is not on the Confluence team. Be mindful of our guidelines around attacking individuals, please. 

@Tom Crowley I understand your feedback about the post, and we've asked the team to address the missteps as well, along with plans to improve in the future. 

[Deleted user]

Mi chiedo se anche tu hai degli hobby interessanti, Monique.

[Monique vdB]

Molti! Mi piace giocare a giochi da tavolo, leggere, viaggiare e guardare gli uccelli. e tu?

[Deleted user]

Not since the new Confluence Editor began to consume all my time. 

[David King]

An update on a ticket I logged (I had mentioned it in an earlier reply), asking for the rollout of the new editor to be deferred for our company.

We are the initial phase: both editors are available, and if I interpreted the hand waving around the rollout schedule, we would have lost the old editor soon. The request was answered, although the support person stated that rollout would resume in Feb 2020.

If I were at all cynical, my guess is that there really was no change in schedule, but at least we have a clearer indication of when the change will happen. I replied that this should give us enough time to move our content to another platform.

[Tom Crowley]

@Monique vdB I can only apologise if anything I said was deemed a direct attack on a manager. I have worked pretty bloody hard to keep most of my comments professional and helpful. My aim in posting Bridget's email was not to incite attacks or sarcasm, but to show that our feedback is still not being taken seriously.

That Bridget manages the authors program and doesn't attend to this side of the Community is exactly my point: she clearly isn't aware of the impact the new editor is having, so when she posts that the Confluence Cloud team have a lot to be proud of it suggests that the actual impact of the new Cloud editor is being heavily filtered for the rest of the business. This only increases my concerns that few Atlassian people outside of the CC Product team (and yourself!) know how much it's affecting customers. There is no way you can read the reactions to the monthly release notes and think "Yes, we are doing a Good Job for our customers here".

I'm resisting posting an Atlassian Authors article about how my biggest contribution to the community is trying to create a level, professional, and non-knee-jerk argument against the new editor of which they are so proud. But since that wouldn't achieve anything and would just be causing trouble for trouble's sake, I'm not doing it. 

But still, the CC Product team are apologising for and trying to fix the rollout. They don't get it. It doesn't matter how you roll out a bad product: it's still going to be a bad product. As @David King says: we've got two months to work out how we're going to continue to work with something that doesn't do what it used to do. And it's not only affecting our work from here on out, it affects the work we already have stored on Confluence.

And until Atlassian acknowledges that they've removed vital functionality from the software, apologises, and - most importantly - puts it back, this conversation is going to continue until your affected customers either leave, or do what the Product team are doing, and settle for a substandard product.

Anyway, I'd love to stop and chat, but one of our users has just lost all of his recently viewed pages, so it seems I have another bug to report and manage.

Merry Christmas from Confluence: the gift that just keeps on giving.

[Tom Crowley]

(Also, well played @Monique vdB !)

[Monique vdB]

@Tom Crowley no problem, Tom, I can tell you are frustrated and have really appreciated that you've kept your tone professional. We are continuing to pass along your feedback internally as well. 

[Tom Crowley]

Ok, couple of questions:

Anyone lost all the Pages and Worked on documents from the Recent Pages list?

And top-of-the-head, does anyone know how the search feature deals (or fails to deal) with special characters? (I know there's a page somewhere, but I'm trying to fix Question 1 at the moment...

[Kat Warner]

Your first query might get lost in this thread but someone else is reporting the same issue here.

This page lists all the expected changes, a feature comparison table, and a guide to article conversion impacts by elements - Confluence Cloud Editor Roadmap

[Tom Crowley]

Thanks @Kat Warner!

[Deleted user]

@Kat Warner It is helpful that Atlassian makes the roadmap available, but it is equally unhelpful because it only includes the detail that Atlassian is willing to disclose.

For example, the roadmap suggests the Table of Contents macro converts completely. Well, the underlying functionality may be preserved, but a bug in the presentation has been introduced that is immediately obvious when you create a TOC, so I am left to conclude that Atlassian doesn't think it's a big deal.

And the plethora of image limitations and bugs barely get any kind of mention, yet they actively prevent me from using the new editor for any content that includes one or more images.

[Kat Warner]

I understand @[deleted] . I am just trying to be as helpful as I can with the tools I have got. 

[Deleted user]

@Kat Warner Kudos. I find it more frustrating than I can adequately convey (without being moderated) that product users are permitted to occupy what amounts to a sterile courtyard surrounding an ivory tower. We actually pay for the experience of being fed propaganda. Perhaps this is what life was like in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

[Bob Sovers]

@Tom Crowley -- The search issue may be one of:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-66339
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67551
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/TRANS-2853

[Bob Sovers]

Anyone else having issues posting comments or replies?

[Bob Sovers]

I was trying to comment on the new issue CONFCLOUD-68273

And I cannot get it to take my comment

[Bob Sovers]

It took as a reply, but not an original comment.

[Deleted user]

The ticket says it isn't being monitored, so you're probably wasting your time. It prompted me to review a bug ticket I submitted over four years ago that has never seen any action.

I've just discovered another bug in the new editor, but I just can't get excited about raising a ticket that will be ignored.

[Tom Crowley]

@Bob Sovers I'm finding commenting being pretty hit and miss on the Community and Jira at the moment. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. No idea why.

[Marian Vidra]

This new editor is a joke. Atlassian forces us to use it but it has so many bugs, errors, and hiccups that make it more and more difficult to use it. Apart from other problems I brought up here, I came across another problem. I just realized that even when I decide (unwillingly) to convert the old editor page to the new one, this "amazing" new editor is unable to convert the old images and I've got a broken image icon on the page. Unbelievable... 

[Alex Fox]

Confluence is definitely not ready for the push Atlassian is performing toward migrating people. If you subscribe to the Confluence Cloud statuspage you see issues several times a week affecting the entire product resulting in people being unable to edit pages at all. 

[Paula Cristina Vaz]

I'm using confluence API to upload pages. This way I can source my documentation in markdown and use confluence as a presentation server.

Guess what?! The new page format is not compatible with the precious one, so in order to format pages I have to re-do all my python scripts. At least, Atlassian could keep retro-compatibility with the macros. What were they thinking?

I'm moving out of this nightmare and build a documentation site of my own.

[Alex Fox]

@Paula Cristina Vaz I'd explore MadCap Flare/Central if I were you. Confluence has never been strong for technical documentation, and these changes weaken it further.

[Paula Cristina Vaz]

Thanks @Alex Fox for the tip. I'll look into it! :-)