Confluence Cloud bug backlog is getting cleaned up 🪲

[#1]

First 10 bug fixes are live! Check out them out here.

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Hi Confluence Community,

My name is Sai Ramanathan, and I’m a Senior Engineering Manager on Confluence Cloud. The Confluence engineering team is continuously working behind the scenes to fix bugs, in addition to delivering new features shared on Community.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been focusing on prioritizing fixes for the most painful experiences for a majority of Confluence customers. We are in the process of streamlining our bug backlog.

This will be helpful because:

• JAC (jira.atlassian.com) will be more representative of our actual bug backlog, since it will include only reproducible bugs

• An up-to-date backlog will reduce noise and make it easier to surface and find high impact bugs

We will be continuing this effort over the next several quarters. As such, in the near future:

• You may notice updates on bugs you’ve voted for or are watching.

• Some of these updates may be requests for more detailed information about reproduction steps in order to help us identify if they are still an issue and prioritize accordingly.

• We will be closing out bugs that cannot be reproduced or that have had no interest/votes/comments recently (after allowing a couple of weeks for your input, response with additional details where relevant). If you disagree and believe a bug is still impacting your team, please let us know by commenting on the issue.

• We will be closing out duplicate bugs and re-directing you when necessary to the relevant open bug.

Thank you for your continued patience, engagement and understanding as we work through this process of making Confluence Cloud better for all of our customers!

As a reminder, you can see the recent bugs we’ve fixed here and our upcoming Roadmap for new features.

[Jack Brickey]

@Sai Ramanathan ,

thanks for keeping us in the loop. I need to take a fresh look at those I’m interested in and will comment with any updates. 

[Andy Gladstone]

I echo @Jack Brickey appreciation here. Anything to clean up the backlog, even an answer that the request/bug/issue is not a priority/not on the roadmap is an answer and will make navigating the large number of tickets and requests easier. As I am always told "No" is also an answer!

[Charles Liss]

Good news...what about Jira :) 

[Harald Seyr]

@Sai Ramanathan 

Thank you for the effort you and your team puts into making Confluence even better. I can only speak for the users in my organisation, we use Confluence as a very important part of our knowledge management. We are very willing to support you with quality input and feedback to make your work more fun and rewarding, we know that getting only negative input as "this does not work" can be a little frustrating at times.

Greetings, Harald

[Nicholas Wade]

Personally I think this is just a whitewash.

You've got bugs going back 4 or more years that have not been fixed.

You have obvious bugs - such as numbered lists which won't continue numbering when something such as a code block or table are added in-between, or font size failure on /excerpt simple text. You have page layouts that are limited. etc..etc..

But worst, you have a bug reporting policy that assumes everyone who's interested will report a bug and thereby increase the number of reports to an actionable level. You also have bug reports that are similar, so individually the same bug receives less hits.

You fail to address issues that have a big impact on documentation and continue to pump out obscure improvements that have limited application. 

You ignore many comments on your failure to resolve issues.

You have a blinkered approach to bug management and have unrealistically high requirements for bugs to be accepted and resolved.

You refuse to engage with users.

You send out questionnaires purporting to engage with the users but which actually are slanted towards positive marketing only. 

You seem singularly incapable of understanding the working practises of your user base, resulting in a tool that provides limited functionality and party baubles.

[Raoul Teeuwen]

Very glad to read this, but am curious if this will be followed through. I must say i do understand a reaction like from @Nicholas Wade , and i hope you don't take that personally but as a sign as how at least some users have experienced Atlassians operation up till this point in time. Really (!) hoping this is a change for the better. Must be a lot of info/bugs to go through, so all the best with that, and looking forward to seeing bugs getting fixed (just today again experience you can't paste a picture in a bulleted list and have it stay sticked to the bullet you're in, instead getting pasted at the end of the bulleted list).

[Matthias]

@Sai Ramanathan Please fix the "Recently updated" macro has been broken for more than a year and a half.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-73076

Why don't you fix it?

[Jason Armistead]

I'm going to echo what @Nicholas Wade said.

Atlassian's bug fixing methodology is completely ridiculous.

For those of us who are system administrators or "power users", we feel the pain of our entire user base, and we might be the only one who bothers to raise a bug report, so instead of tens, hundreds, or thousands of votes, an issue might only get a handful (mostly from other similar people to ourselves).

I DO NOT want every single user in my organization to have to waste even more precious time logging a bug or up-voting my report.  My word should be good enough. Atlassian has the ability to quickly identify which company's instance of Confluence I am using, and therefore, how many users are in my company. And the same is true for everyone from other companies that sees my bug reports and says that it affects them or comments and follows it. There is no need for more votes. Just sensible actions from Atlassian!

What I think is most appalling is that Atlassian's product managers have no empathy for the plight of users or system administrators.

One example is setting a default sort order for pages in a space, e.g. alphabetical for all pages. This cannot be set? Why not? I have to go through and use the Space settings to Reorder pages manually.  Over, and over, and over again!!! What a complete waste of time!  I don't believe for a second that there isn't someone inside Atlassian who hasn't felt this same pain. Yet this remains unresolved.

Another example is "smart links", which when they appeared in Confluence and Jira were almost universally shouted about by users as being inconvenient, against their company policy, and quite simply, a potential security threat. And Atlassian took many months to finally start to change things and give more control. But they got hung-up on "the freedom of content creators" instead of "the policy of Confluence/Jira administrators and their companies"

The time has well passed for Atlassian to start listening and acting, instead of investing their developer time in rolling out features that most users don't want or need (and would just prefer the existing bugs to be fixed).