🌱Please tell us about when and why you delete pages

droo
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 20, 2019

👋Hi there, a few of us at Atlassian would love to learn about how you use "page delete" functionality in Confluence.

To start simply, when and why do you delete pages today?

If you were to go to your Trash (in Space Settings) right now, what kinds of pages would you see? How might you use or not use them in the future? Finally, who do you believe should be able to see these pages?

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Your responses are helping us build a better product for you, your team, and the future of work. Thank you  🙂

6 comments

Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_
Community Leader
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November 20, 2019

A lot of our page deletes are from information that is no longer valid.  We also have a lot of deletes that are a result of a complete reformatting or redesign of a page, around current content.  Our people like to start with a blank slate, rather than try to clean up and redesign an old page.  We will also have a few were someone is trying out new macros or learning to us Confluence, and then they trash their test/learning pages.

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droo
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 20, 2019

Great, thanks for the response @Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_ . How important would you say it is that deleted pages can only be seen by space admins (not all users)?

Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_
Community Leader
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Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 21, 2019

I don't mind if people can delete their own created content. It can help with keeping the space tidy.  I kinda feel like the creator of the content is the better judge of if it should stay/go and it can always be brought back if deleted by mistake (so long as the trash isn't emptied)

I don't think anyone but a space admin should be able to delete content created by someone else though.  Confluence Admins can always raise a new Space Admin if needed, or help out with page deletion.  

As far as who can see if a page has been deleted?  Hmm. On one hand I wonder if it does matter.  Other hand I'm sorta a Needs to Know person, and does everyone *really* need to know about the Deleted content.  I don't really think they do, but then I've always been a Confluence Admin, so I *could* see it and I haven't had the experience of needing/wanting to see it and not being able to.  So, my experiences are limited to that POV.

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Dan Winkler
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November 20, 2019

Hi there, @droo Our deleted pages are mostly the result of users who've published something that was a draft or incomplete and then decided to delete it.

Another type of item in the trash is attachments from pages that I've copied but *don't* need the attachments. My process is to copy the old page, set it to private so that only I can see it, publish it, delete the attachments, then set it to public view. I set it to private because I noticed that folks who watch the page (via watching the Space, perhaps?) get notified when an attachment is deleted, and I don't want the delete message clogging up their inbox. (As an aside, I'd like to see the ability to copy a page without including attachments.)

Peeking at your reply about only space admins being able to see those pages, I don't think it's important to us at all. Most of our users don't know where to look for deleted pages (I barely know where they are, to be honest with you.)

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Nicole Reichert November 20, 2019

A lot of the space trash I've come around is either a sync issue that killed page that can no longer be updated (and is copied)! This is usually seen on some older major versions of Confluence I've seen thankfully. 

 

The other pages I see is when end users realise that attachments are stored on pages, rather than needing an actual link on the page (hyperlink) to be there. This is usually a small issue but leads to a few dead pages here and there with empty links to attachments. :)

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Bob Sovers November 22, 2019

I have 2 use cases for deleting pages. 

The first is when we decide on a different level of detail for our pages.  For example, when first started, the documentation of our Tableau usage included a page for every view.  When we changed to just a page for every worksheet (the parent of multiple views), then all of the existing view pages had to be deleted.

The second use case is for deprecated objects and/or subsystems that were documented in the past.  Retention of the documentation pages for deprecated objects is not desired.

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Tom Crowley January 6, 2020

Usually when I'm deleting pages it's because I want to get rid of something and have to delete. each. page. individually. because there isn't an option in the UI to delete all child pages when you delete the parent.

Tom Crowley January 6, 2020

Ok, that's a lie. I have a blank Word document called "Page Deleter" that I upload and with which I overwrite the parent page, instructing it to also overwrite the child pages. This usually leaves me with a single page to delete, unless there are too many child pages and the process crashes.

While looking at page deletion, maybe fix it so you can just delete all child pages at the same time...

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Annelotte June 11, 2020

In our day-to-day operations pages are deleted because of

  • old: replaced by another page, or about teams that no longer exist, ...
  • testing: copies of other pages where we tested out new formatting or to create a new version that we ultimately decided we were not going to release
  • and mostly, in my case, automatically generated pages of the "automated release notes" plugin that for some reason cannot overwrite existing pages, so it creates new pages with a timestamp and I manually remove the previous versions a few times a week :-/ 

Outside the regular processes, we delete a lot of pages whenever we do a restructuring of a space or we merge some stuff together. 

Anand Inamdar_Amoeboids
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June 11, 2020

@anne we hear you 👋

We are revamping ARN and soon plan to support ability to update Confluence pages in addition to creating them.

Feel free to comment/vote on this feature request in our roadmap - https://autoreleasenotes.roadmapper.app/view/1/issue/45100

Best,
Anand

Bob Sovers June 11, 2020

@Anand Inamdar_Amoeboids --- If this is about deleting pages in Confluence Cloud, why is your link about comment/voting on a Jira issue?   (The link takes me to a page entitled "Automated Release Notes app for Jira)

 

--- I like the form of the page, and would like to see something like that for all of the Confluence Cloud  bugs/suggestions/ideas

Anand Inamdar_Amoeboids
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June 11, 2020

Hey @Bob Sovers

My response was specifically 3rd point mentioned by @Annelotte

It was related to our plugin for Jira, Automated Release Notes.

About the comment/voting part, it is another of our plugins called Roadmap portal for Jira service desk.

I am not from the Atlassian team & thus don't have control over how they manage their feature requests/roadmap etc :)

Hope that clears the confusion.


Best,
Anand

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