Discovering content just got easier with related pages!

[#1]

Hello Community, 

Tim from the Confluence Cloud Product Management team here.

I’m excited to introduce related pages, a new feature that uses smarts to help surface relevant Confluence pages.

Have you ever gotten to the end of a Confluence page and thought “well, now what?” We’ve got you covered! Related pages are automatically generated suggestions for further reading, based on pages that are viewed or are organized together. This helps you gain context on collaborative work faster, and quickly discover relevant articles in a knowledge base, even when the pages aren't linked or organized together.

This feature is on by default. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Admins can choose to turn this off at the space level under Space settings > Related pages.

• Permissions are respected, so only pages you have access to will be shown.

• If related pages are on for a space, page contributors can also show or hide on a case-by-case basis. If you choose to hide, select More actions (•••), then Advanced details > and either Show related pages or Hide related pages.

• This is only available on pages at the moment, not blogs.

• This is only available in Confluence and is not currently available in Jira Service Management customer portals.

Related pages is currently rolling out, so it should come to your site soon if you don’t see it on your Confluence Cloud instance today.

Questions, feedback, or comments? Let us know in the thread!

[Srinatha T]

@Tim Clipsham Thanks for the update. 

[Sven Schatter _K15t_]

Hey @Tim Clipsham, looks really cool! Will there be a way for third-party apps to access related pages?

Cheers,
Sven

[Tim Clipsham]

Hey @Sven Schatter _K15t_, thanks! We haven't yet added this to the public APIs in this first release. Is there a particular use case you have in mind it would help support?

[Sven Schatter _K15t_]

Hey @Tim Clipsham,

For any apps that provide a custom view on Confluence content it would be helpful to be able to access the related articles. I'm specifically thinking of extending our app Scroll Viewport so that related articles can be displayed in Viewport Help Centers as well. I know of a couple of similar apps that would pretty much have the same use case for displaying related articles in their own view.

It would be really nice if related pages wouldn't be accessible through a separate endpoint but instead could be added as an expansion to the existing Content & CQL endpoint responses.

Cheers,
Sven

[Hua Soon SIM _Akeles_]

The usefulness of the related pages will depends on the accuracy of the Confluence as well as the content contributed by the users. Hence I feel this is very challenging to enable it globally by default.

While it may be useful for KB articles, there are a few scenarios where related pages information may be suppressed as it may affect the look and feel of the page

• Space Home page
• Index Pages

Is it possible for admins to set the default display mode (on/off) at the site level? Then the space admins can override the settings at the space level.

It is a bit painful if the site got 300 spaces and the Confluence admins have to go into 300 spaces to disable the settings.

Is there a Related Pages macro which we can add on those pages or page templates? I think the idea is good and we want to add it on selected pages.

[G subramanyam]

Thank you @Tim Clipsham for sharing this update. I will need to try this feature to understand few scenario's.

[Tim Clipsham]

Hi @Hua Soon SIM _Akeles_ thanks for taking the time to share feedback. Answers to each are below.

Space Home page... Index Pages

Related pages aren't shown on the Space Overview (home page).

For "Index Pages" (pages that are empty and/or just show child pages), these are much less likely to have related pages shown because we have a few rules in place that filter out low quality recommendations. Users can also turn it off for these pages individually if they'd prefer too.

Is it possible for admins to set the default display mode (on/off) at the site level?

There isn't a site level setting currently. We're expecting it'll be the exception that related pages are turned off. I hear you though - if it turns out to be a common action it would be cumbersome to trawl through 300 spaces manually. I've noted this feedback 👍

Is there a Related Pages macro which we can add on those pages or page templates? I think the idea is good and we want to add it on selected pages.

There isn't a macro, although related pages can be turned on/off per page and you can set a default behaviour at the space level. It's not as flexible as a macro, but it will enable you to turn it on for select pages by exception.

[gary_sullivan]

Can admins directly control which pages are "related"?

And is it based on the individual user's page views, or some kind of aggregate?

[Tim Clipsham]

Hi @gary_sullivan, related pages are based on a combination of factors, such as pages that are viewed together by multiple users and pages that are organised together. In this first release, there isn't a way to manually choose which pages are related, although this is something we're considering.

[Hua Soon SIM _Akeles_]

@Tim Clipsham 

Thanks for getting back on my feedback.

It's good to have rules to filter out low quality recommendations. 

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

This is great! We mainly use Confluence for our public documentation in combination with Refined. Can't wait to see this feature there in the future. It would save us a lot of time 😊

[Cora Egli_bitvoodoo_]

I was very perplexed when encountering this feature for the first time since I could not find any info on it. This blog is very helpful; thanks for this!

UX topic: The "hide for everyone" option next to the related pages was not completely clear. It could be understood that using this option will turn off the feature in the entire space or even globally. The overlay title says, "Hide related pages for everyone?" - only the text below makes it clear that only this one page is affected by this choice.

[Tim Clipsham]

Thanks @Cor for the feedback - I've passed this onto our team

[RV]

Hey all, to be honest I still have to experience the value of this feature.

First of all I was a bit surprised about the intrusiveness of this feature's rollout. It has never happened before that Atlassian interferes with the actual content on a page, but now they do, rendering content on pages that clients did not ask for, and cannot really control either.

We use Confluence to structure our policies and processes. Integrity of that information is very important, and this requires strict control over what people see. We interconnect relevant pages manually and this leads to a cohesive, well-structured system of policies, processes and procedures.

However, the sudden release of this feature has caused people to see totally irrelevant pages to be highlighted, breaking the experience. In addition, employees consider all content to be carefully administered, hence this feature has caused more confusion than it has caused added value.

Last but not least: the way that admins can control this feature is also not really what I was hoping for. Switching off is only possible on Space level. Which means that I have to plough through our Confluence instance and make hundreds of clicks to disable all the unwanted modules. This should really be controllable through a global setting.

Summarizng, we totally love Confluence, but this feature and the way it was forced upon users, was not ideal and causes more problems than it solves. Hope this helps refining the feature and the administrative options offered.

[Tami Dubi]

Hi 

I agree with RV. 
1. You are interfering with the organization's priorities and not for the first time. 

2. If you put such an intrusive feature, you must give the Site Admin permission to shut it off in one action.

3. The related pages I viewed are not relevant, at least not from the organization's point of view. So releasing this without the ability of knowledge managers to decide the relevancy is totally not cool!

4. In the Onboarding processes, there are predefined flows- you are messing with the flows.

5. We need a detailed explanation of how the recommendation works: do labels have an impact? When you are checking users, are you checking unique users or just entrances that are not unique (your documentation doesn't cover it)? 

6. Please add in the related page title that you show on a page- Automated by Atlassian - so the origin of this will be clear (it is not enough to put it in the question mark).

I don't understand, you have so many bags and important issues to solve, and you are just creating more noise instead of real improvements

[Rachel Male]

Is there a way of preselecting the recommended pages?

As currently the recommendations shown on our pages are wildly inaccurate.

Would be great to be able to select or have say recommended pages pulled form only a certain part of our information architecture. 

[Uday Joshi]

This is a good feature. However, I see that not all the pages are relevant. We should have the ability to select/hide the relevant pages.

Also, there should have been a 'Global Setting' to turn this off at once.

[Logi Helgu]

I agree with other...this is very intrusive and by default having this enabled is just wrong, sorry Atlassian, you did something you shouldn't have...accept it, change it, and make sure you don't work this way again.

All new things should be enabled by the users (you don't need to look far, Trello is a good example ;)

I don't fully understand the logic behind enabling this by default...and I'm a little sad that we have no way of controlling this or even just have this a new macro that we could use...then everybody would be happy :)

Personally I like to label things that are related and then have my own "Related items" with the Content by Label...then I have full control and can use it when I feel...but most of of the time I link directly between pages so I don't even need the "related items". 

I ❤ Confluence but this it not really helping me in the "fight" to keep this tool on top of other options (when suddenly there is automatic content added to pages) since not everyone shares my love and thinks that Sharepoint is just as good a place :D ...I love that we are getting new features (even though I have really mixed feelings about this one... probably useful for someone :) but you can't push the features like this :)

[Logi Helgu]

The more I'm trying to wrap my head around this the more I'm getting annoyed...sorry for being negative here....but

- I can't globally shut this off...do you know how many spaces we have...and how hard I've worked to split content (and general usage) into clearly defined spaces.  If I want to disable this until I've introduced it and explained it then that's quite a lot of work...a lot more that reading this blog post, experimenting with the feature and writing these comments.

- I would love to know what you were trying to accomplish. (that might help me understand this and how to use it). "a new feature that uses smarts to help surface relevant Confluence pages." to all honesty the "smarts" (whatever that is here) don't seem that smart.  "Have you ever gotten to the end of a Confluence page and thought “well, now what?”...we'll if your trying to "solve" that...then I would suggest that you should improve your content and link to something like "Do you want to know more"...or like me and make sure that everything is clearly defined in a space only dedicated to a single theme/topic and that really helps knowing that you can wonder around the menu and look at other things there. Even on the example in the image above I question if the related pages are helping...or just making me wonder why I should connect to the online printer :D

I'm missing a rollback function for your rollouts ;)

[Logi Helgu]

What happened to my first comment...was it overwritten by my next "The more..." comment?

[Logi Helgu]

Ok...looks like my first comment was moderated and now I would like to know why...this is beginning to look suspicious...I would love to know what happened to my first comment here (a few minutes ago)

I agreed with others, this is intrusive, you've never done it like this before...and you shouldn't, please make sure you don't follow this way to rolling out features...is there a way for me (as a user here on the forum to see my comment and what happened to it?

[Logi Helgu]

And this should be a macro and not pushed/enabled for all pages

[Sekajipo Taplah]

Thank you everyone for the feedback ! We're currently compiling this feedback to the rest of the team and will make incremental improvements

[Brent Gardner]

Very unwanted 'feature'.

Should have been opt-in not opt-out.

How do we turn off globally? How do we turn off per-space?

Please do not alter our environment without our permission.

[Cortlandt _]

Ditto all the comments asking how this feature works:

> We need a detailed explanation of how the recommendation works: do labels have an impact? When you are checking users, are you checking unique users or just entrances that are not unique (your documentation doesn't cover it)? 

In specific terms  what does "based on pages that are viewed or are organized together" mean?