Looking back over the comments on here, just out of curiosity, and it's confirming a point I and a few others have made across the other threads in recent months: people are going to break the community guidelines because getting a reaction from the moderators shows that Atlassian is paying some attention to what was said. Negative attention (censoring, threats of blocking) is better than no attention, because we want to be heard.
On page one of this discussion are two lengthy posts by @[deleted] and myself. These are written politely, thoughtfully, and with a genuine goal of highlighting problems with the new editor and the relationship between Atlassian and its customers. @Bob Sovers persists in listing the many, many bugs, and has done so again on page one here.
Has anyone from Atlassian interacted with these posts? No. There has been no apology, no challenge, no interest, no refutation from the Product team. But we know that they are active on the forum, because a post containing only the word "Improved" has been 'liked'.
But even that is laughable. It's been 'liked'. There was no follow up to find out how it's been improved, or where it's improved, or how these improvements help that particular user. The Product team are clearly not here for constructive feedback, they want praise. And that comment was vague, unhelpful praise. So they liked it. It's probably going in end-of-week reports. "How's the new editor being received?" "Well, someone says it's "improved", so pretty well I think!"
If our comments happen to coincide with a planned feature, then sometimes they swoop in to collect any praise they can by announcing some long overdue update, or the return of a feature that was removed, no, stolen (because we are paying for this, are we not?) from us. Are you bored of us now Atlassian? If only it was that easy for us to switch off and start ignoring you and your product.
I'm going to suggest that your Christmas reading for the break is not about Product Management or Customer Relationship Management or Customer Service or even about common decency, but a short fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson:
You're creating a dumbed-down, childish editor. Well, it's time you started listening to the 'children'. The appreciation of thoughtless praise is not how you grow a product, gain respect, or be taken seriously. From the end of The Emperor's New Clothes:
"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.
"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."
"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, "This procession has got to go on." So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.
Hi there @Jessica Taylor , I'm still waiting for the announcement that you've realized you made a huge, ill-conceived mistake with the "new editor" and have decided to cut your loses and scuttle it. When are you going to make that inevitable decision? The way I look at it is this: you either get rid of the garbage new editor or you lose 75% of your customers, the ones who, like me, have been using Confluence the longest (or even medium-term long).
One thing I'm consistently seeing in these posts: the only positive comments about the new editor come from people who also say things like "we just started using Confluence...". You've abandoned your loyal customer base to satisfy the Instagram Facebook Twitter generation. Shame on you.
I have it installed but no longer see the option to edit a Word Doc with it. It doesn't seem to work on pages made with the new or old editors.
My organization hasn't had great buy-in with Confluence. Features I'm using to "sell" to colleagues keep changing or getting removed altogether so implementation has become even more difficult.
@Tom Crowley if you're stuck between the rock of the cr*p editor and the hard place of mscumsucking word, another option, albeit lots of work, is to go through the API and generate complex pages programmatically. My spidey sense is that all the functionality is still there if you insert the correct xhtml in the body for nested tables, off-page file references, nested macros, it's just that the stupid new editor doesn't expose it (but I haven't verified this).
On our server sites we generate a variety of formal record pages using Python, uploading various files (txt, pptx, etc) and using page properties and labels to index them in various ways. It did take some rooting around in the raw page storage format to figure it out, but once the tools were built to compose all the bits it's been pretty easy to use. (Although I am in the process of refactoring everything to be more capable of fully round-tripping data in and out of Confluence...)
cheers
& happy holidays to the community! Maybe the fat elf will put coal in Atlassian's stockings & wake them up to do better in the New Year...
Cheers @Michael Corvin. I might look at that. We currently publish to Zendesk, PDF, and Confluence, and until the comments feature is usable it gets reviewed in Word (don't ask...). I did try writing in markdown and pasting it in, but it's not practical. I guess we'll see how it goes - I'm possibly going to suggest publishing to PDF and just using Confluence as a PDF repository for certain documents where formatting matters.
Looks like Atlassian are slowly acknowledging the impact of this year's Confluence Cloud changes. The link to the current page in the list of related content for another page:
"2019 has been a disastrous debacle for Confluence Cloud with the new editor being so buggy and having lost core functionality. This has rendered Confluence Cloud unusable for many of our use cases and therefore largely irrelevant to our organization except as a rough note pad. Usage has decreased and we'll be examining alternatives unless the New Year sees Atlassian rapidly fixing the problems and restoring the myriad lost functionalities.
UI improvements are worthless if functionality is lost.
Fortunately, our established Confluence server sites are stable and we continue developing them, extending automations through the API, etc.."
The comments read a lot like those associated with the newest editor (Fabric), showing a lack of planning & forewarning by Atlassian.
I guess the "dumbing-down" of Confluence has been occurring over several years now, I guess that when they do away words and just leave us with GIFs and emoji then we will have reached their desired outcome!
@Pato Moschcovich / @[deleted] Yeah, I thought it might have been - it sounded familiar. I saw another link that was directing me to the last unread comment for a page, so figured they must have mucked the link up somehow. Just a little bit of karmic rebalancing!
@Bob Sovers I remember reading some of those comments. They really just don't learn, do they?
LoL.... @Bob Sovers , maybe they are trying to drive Confluence back to the purity and simplicity of Ward Cunningham's original Wiki Wiki concept before it became this universe of complex, rich content hypermedia infested with rampant emojiis... errr, no, in that case we'd have a pure markup editor back!
(For those around long enough to remember, that last great gnashing of teeth and lamenting happened when the markup mode in the editor was deprecated. At least that transition was understandable because markup ~= storage format so maintaining both as more and more macros and formatting options were implemented was unwieldy. At least in that transition we gained functionality, not lost it, so it was a fair trade...!)
@Jessica Taylorcurious why no-one at Atlassian has responded to @Tom Crowley et al besides banning one of them when they apparently crossed the line. They seem to be raising valid concerns yet there has been no response (and not for lack of attention to this thread given that you replied to Administrator within an hour). I didn't have an opinion on Atlassian's customer service before but now it comes across as arrogant/intentionally neglectful.
@jeremyThey have all consistently done that in all forums where the poor quality of the new editor is at issue. I get the feeling they have been explicitly ordered by whatever management to ignore questions directed at them about the poor quality of the new editor, and to ignore discussion about it among us participants as well.
We don't ban accounts for criticism, but we do ban personal attacks and sockpuppet accounts. Two individuals have now created multiple sockpuppet accounts, and unfortunately that means the accounts will be closed down.
If you want to continue to participate in the discussion, please keep this in mind.
That link seems to just link to the main article. Can you copy some of the content of the comment to make it easier to cross reference which one you mean?
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