Change to your content is in your hands

[V-G]

@Tiffany I did. I also send them a ticket yesterday, I'll patiently wait in the mean time :)

[Chris Rehberg]

@Tiffany- this is exactly the sort of support response that is infuriating. Why can you not just re-enable it for everybody already?

[Helen Gosper]

As @Kim Hirschman says, Atlassian should take note of the number of peole who really loved the old editer. Two points here:

It would be helpful for us if Atlassian could decide on its messaging. A 'legacy editor' suggests un-supported functionality that is eventually going away despite what they tell us.

@Tiffany  late last year I spent an hour on a call with a former Confluence product manager who explained that it was all about platform consistency and scalability. Great for Atlassian; great for the customer in theory. But you guys overlooked one key thing - the use cases we hold dear for Confluence. When we were outraged, it was dismissed as people obecting to change. Not so - the new editor has a lot of great features and it makes sense to have a flatter offering, but the problem was suddenly deprecating a heap of features that we needed. Btw that Confluence product manager promised to get back to me on a couple of specific topics I had raised around images. In order, they were:

1. in a documentation space, attaching all images to to an image library and inserting onto pages as required.
2. linking to images
3. image border effects.

He didn't.

[Nicole]

@Helen Gosper: Well said. 

[MarcoWerner.Trillmich]

Can someone please link a tutorial on how to get rid of the new editor and keep using the old one? The explanation on https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/Convert-your-old-pages-to-the-new-editor/ba-p/1292275 is not applicable in my case.

[Ian Kaplan]

You have to ask Atlassian support to add the "legacy Editor" template to your account. When you create a new page, you scroll down through the templates and selected the Legacy Editor template and the previous editor will be available for your page.

The work around suggested by Atlassian does not have the functionality that most of us want.

[Peter Fjelsten]

Normally when superseding a product you'd want to ensure that it's at least as good as the previous one or at least not make it difficult (remove templates, nag about upgrading to new editor experience, FUD about "soon to be discontinued") to stay with old one.

I had completely disregarded the new editor but starting to build a new large site I understood via Atlassian communication that the new editor was at the stage that it was as good as the old one.

20 pages later: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67862

Oh well, caveat emptor :-(

[Rodney Hughes]

I don’t find Atlassian’s attitude of blaming the User in @Shanon Spaniol’s post on 27th March 2020 very helpful or respectful of the frustration we are all experiencing. 

Even on 6th April telling us that “There are also others who have been happy with the new editor”.  It seems our complaints mean nothing because others are ignorant of what features and functionality have been taken away.  That is like telling us meat lovers after all meat has been taken away forever that “there are vegetarians who are perfectly happy on a diet of lettuce and such and that soy burgers taste just the same”.  !!!

Even @Tiffany  on 26th March 2020 tried to reassure us “what what we build puts our customers' needs first”.  If that was TRULY the case there wouldn’t be this absolute outrage response from all of us that you have totally cut our legs off at the knees by taking away the features you previously had built and we enjoyed!

So whilst Shannon Spaniol on 6th of April 2020 tried to reassure us that the old editor is still available and we can “contact support to have it enabled.”

On 23rd of July 2020, after 2-weeks of discussion on WHY I wanted the old editor and what features of the old editor were important to me, one of the Atlassian Cloud Support Engineers reinstated the old editor on my CLOUD instance.

Great .. but

All he did was provide another template which uses the old editor. 

All my old pages created with the old editor, including the ones created with my old company template and my company template itself, are still stuck with that wretched new editor that forced on us.

I suppose I could use the old editor template and REDO my company template so I can redo all my old pages t get back to what I need to use….

But contrary to some of the Atlassian remarks in this discussion that the “legacy editor isn’t going anywhere”, he stated:

“but please keep in mind that this editor is going away at some point.”

So why bother getting my system back to a useable format when it will all go away again ....

I look at these things like the history of Sydney and Adelaide Trams.  Before I was born, Sydney had Trams in the centre of Sydney along George Street – the busiest street in Sydney and hence the catch phrase “busier than George Street”.  Adelaide also had trams down King William St, its busiest street.
Those tram tracks had been installed after politician decisions in each State and would have cost a fortune to build at tax payer’s and traveller’s ticket expense. 

Somewhere along the way, another couple of politicians in each State decided to spend another huge amount of money ripping up all the tracks to improve the experience of people in their city. 

Then not that long ago, another politician decided to put all that trackwork and rolling stock back costing a fortune to build at tax payer’s and traveller’s ticket expense to improve the experience of people in their city.

The difference here is that eventually the politicians eventually got on with reinstating the people's experience. 
I don’t hold the same hopes of rapidity with Atlassian’s old editor.

[Ben Shuker]

The other issue that comes to mind reading your comment @Rodney Hughes is that for me, if I'd gone through our hundreds of pages and updated them to the new editor, I'd now have to do it all again since features are still coming across (eg image alignment and captions).

I still don't understand why the Fabric editor was released and forced on users before it was ready for general use.

We now have two broken editors to choose from:

1. The Legacy editor that we're all used to, that we've created hundreds or thousands of pages with, an editor with features that we all rely on to build the content that we need, even with it's issues we've found work arounds (while remaining confident that Atlassian will eventually work out the bugs), or;
2. The Fabric editor, with emojis.

[Ira Chandler]

Sorry,  @Ben Shuker.  As you can read in the comments here and elsewhere, Atlassian just does not CARE about you, or me, or any users.

We were sold Jira Service Desk only to find that Confluence docs presented there were UNABLE to display a TOC.  That was a bug for 3 years that they just did not care about and developed all kinds of new stuff instead of fixing what was broke.  This editor fiasco is ONLY one more example of their utter disregard for users.

[Ian Kaplan]

To my fellow long time Confluence users: Thank you for your comments. The more we speak up, the more hope we have that our needs will be met. At least in my case, there is no easy way to leave Confluence since I have so much content which is critical to my business and engineering work. 

I have also found Atlassian unresponsive. I've written twice to the CEOs and to everyone else I could find. Atlassian seems to be following the Microsoft model for being a software business.

The ray of hope for me is that they did add support for the Legacy template. I did, indeed, have to ask for it and go through an explanation for why I needed it. But it is available and I regularly use it to create new pages.

My hope is that eventually Atlassian will add the document link feature which is critical for my work. I can live without other nice features, line text indenting.

Like other commenters, I have a hard time understanding why it is taking Atlassian so long to add this feature to the new editor. Or, perhaps more importantly, how they released a new editor that is worse than the previous one.

Thanks again for your comments and being activate advocating for change. 

[Peter Kidson]

How can I get the advanced ('legacy') editor on my personal (Cloud Free) Confluence?
( I already have it at work on the company's paid-for Confluence Cloud).

[Peter Kidson]

The legacy editor isn’t going anywhere ... 
We have no plans to end-of-life it in the foreseeable future, and if and when we do, we’ll make sure to explicitly communicate it well in advance.

We need a much stronger commitment on it,  as the 'new' editor is simply not fit for professional use, nor does it seem it ever ever will be,

As a start I suggest calling it the Advanced editor and making it the default again.  The klunky new one can be called  the Lite, Limited or Children's editor

[Dan Winkler]

@Peter Kidson With a personal free Cloud instance I've found that I could access the legacy editor from the Overview page of my personal space.

To continue to work with the old editor, I just copied the Overview page.

[Ian Kaplan]

You can get the legacy editor by copying a page created with the legacy editor. But this can be awkward.

Another way to go is to ask support to add the legacy editor template to you account. In my case they asked why I wanted this. I explained that there were features, like the document link feature, that were only available with the legacy editor. They then added the legacy editor template.

[Chris Rehberg]

@Peter Kidson- "Children's Editor" - that's gold! :D Gave me a good laugh this morning :)

To everyone - if you think Atlassian will re-instate the old editor with vigour, you're kidding yourself. Browse the support requests - I've seen simple things get zero response after ten years!

For now, copying an old page and re-purposing it gets me out of trouble. But it won't help those who need to migrate Children's Editor pages back to Advanced Editor. And despite requesting multiple times, they haven't reinstated the "template" for me. What a crock of botched crap from Atlassian.

[Helen Gosper]

The depressing thing about copying old pages to repurpose (which I also need to do, at least for product documentation where I need the functionality) is that you feel like a luddite when really you want to be able to embrace new features. There are lots of things I love about using the new editor - but please Atlassian give it some guts.

[Ture Hoefner]

Support enabled legacy page creation on all of our cloud instances a while back and now it is gone.  We NEED it.  We write apps for Confluence Cloud.  A large part of our support load is figuring out problems that are only in the new/fabric editor.

I guess I'll use "Copy" to create legacy pages, I don't have time to deal w/ getting legacy enabled on all of our instances (again). 

Legacy page creation needs to be turned on for all instances until the new/fabric page editor is ready for prime time.  It is not.  Forcing people to use it, making it difficult to use the legacy editor, is not going to get fabric ready any sooner.

[Chris Rehberg]

@Dgture- very rational and reasonable proposal. The problem is, when you find yourself hitting a brick wall continually with someone who cannot be rational and reasonable in return, your only choice is to walk away. The real problem here is that there are few suitable candidates one may entertain for a date if walking away from this relationship ... and bet Atlassian knows it.

[Peter Kidson]

@Dan Winkler 

Thanks.  But what are the exact steps to access the legacy editor from from the Overview page of my personal space.    Sadly I see no sign of it :-(  

[Peter Kidson]

My issue with the Children's (aka 'new') editor, is that they have crippled the table feature.  which is how I do 95+% of my pages..   
It's now even more inflexible,   Years ago you could adjust cell height if I remember correctly.  That went, and now you even can't adjust table width.  And the intuitive and powerful legacy UI, has now been replaced by the staggeringly laborious, limited and unintuitive  new one.

It's so bad my initial thought was that it was a pet project given to a son/daughter of one of the big bosses.     Does anyone have any better insight into what their 'thinking' behind these dumbed-down tables is ?

[Dan Winkler]

Hi @Peter Kidson Here's exactly what works for me.

1. I go to my personal Confluence site. https://danwinkler.atlassian.net/wiki/home
2. Then I click Dan's Personal Space which, for me, takes me to the Overview page.
   1. You can confirm that this page uses the legacy editor by trying to edit it. When you do, you should see the familiar legacy interface at the bottom of the page (What did you change box, Notify watchers, Publish, Close).
   2. If you started to edit the page just to make sure it's the right one, close it.
3. Click the three buttons in the top right and click Copy. I name that new page whatever - Legacy Editor Page might be a good name for it.

Hope that works for you, let me know if you have any more questions.

Dan

[venkspr]

@Tiffany : I am on free version of cloud and don't have legacy editor exprience. Can you please help ?

I have several other paid and onprem confluences, which don't have this problem.

[Aleksandr Paren]

Hey Atlassians! Are you crazy??? Today you completely disabled old editor when I push "Create" button. 

I have no good words!

[Aleksandr Paren]

"

The legacy editor isn’t going anywhere

"

Liers! On Friday you are disabled possibility to create page in the old editor.

@Tiffany do you think it is OK situation?