Introducing Findable Drafts - a better way to start, pause, and resume your work

[Glen Young]

@Mark Thompson I hear what you're both saying, but neither of you work at Atlassian, know the code base, know the constraints. It’s very easy to look at saying that’s a 1 day for a junior dev, but they might be the most famous last words in product management I’ve ever heard.

I can tell this issue is frustrating to you and I’m sure the product team would love to fix it as much as you. Prioritisation is a multi headed beast. It’s easy to judge a decision when you can only see one of the heads.

From what I can see they are evolving the product in ways that are not always the obvious answer, but that improve the product as a whole in the longer term.

This draft feature for example has basically eliminated random drafts piling up in the first place. It’s fixing the problem before it happens. Seems like a good product decision to me.

[Mark Thompson]

@Glen Young - We can agree to disagree.  I've worked for a few fairly large companies.  Updates have to made but configuration should be part of the design.

[Eliot Martin]

It’s very easy to look at saying that’s a 1 day for a junior dev, but they might be the most famous last words in product management I’ve ever heard.

I don't know the code base and was obviously being facetious, but logic dictates that if you have the ability to tag a draft page and display it in the tree view, providing the capability to not display it is a relatively straightforward problem to solve.

[Glen Young]

It’s never that easy @Eliot Martin 

[Eliot Martin]

Lol, Atlassian claims to have 25,000+ active developers and is worth $30.91B.

The lack of feature completeness is not the result of a lack of resources or automation available to test, review, and document.  It's just that the product owners didn't think that it was a valid story.

I am tempted to get one of our junior Java devs to throw together a plugin just to prove how rudimentary an issue adding a filter to the tree view really is.

[Matthew McGarity]

Regarding the current tenor of the comments, centered around the lack of user control to enable/disable the feature, I wanted to share some food-for-thought that may inform other Product Managers.

A long time ago (and maybe still), WordPress had a defined philosophy regarding if/when to present users with options.  I agree with this not being a toggle-able feature, partially because Confluence already has a metric f-ton of selections already, but also because sometimes engineers design their work to address a problem in the best way possible, even though it might have side effects we hope are less-annoying that the original problem that was solved.

https://wptavern.com/why-wordpress-has-less-options-not-more

[Mark Thompson]

Wordpress core software is free.  Make Jira/Confluence free and I'll quit complaining.  

[Kristian Klima]

@Sam Ugulava  

As to your Drafts vs Unpublished changes and the general usefulness on page micro-workflow.

A page with unblished changes becomes, by definition, a draft. But I accept your definition, strange as it is - given the page default page statuses... ;)

What I'm missing, terribly missing, in Confluence is the ability to work with drafted content (your drafts and my drafts - anything that's unpublished).

At the moment, a) I can't detect a page with Unpublished Changes until I click it in the tree. Crucial if you work with multiple development swimlanes with multiple publishing dates.

b) more importantly, I cannot see the changes until I click to edit. I'm sorry but this is stupid. I regularly work with multiple drafts at the same time when working on large content changes. Natively, Confluence Cloud forces me to either Publish or open multiple changes, that I have to keep the track of, in the edit mode.

Naturally, I use Comala Workflow solution. If you work in a Continuous Delivery environment, or release once a week/two weeks, Comala is the only way to get around the limitations of Confluence. 

You have

• Draft label in the Tree
• Page Status label
• Unpublished Changes label on the top of the page

They are all mere visual cues. But other than that, they do nothing.

What about putting those labels to actual use in actual workflows - make them matter in a real workflow, make them affect how the page behaves, what can happen to it, who can work with it... 

[Michael Pieber]

The idea is good. I wish I could delete several drafts at once! Some time ago Confluence had a problem when copying pages - and it created tons of drafts. Deleting them one by one is exhausting and annoying!

[m.sallan]

A bit an eyesore. We have a public and a private space to deal with drafts. With all these automatically appearing even at the public space of many pages, was a bit alarming to all collaborators. For a big team who are basically writers and are not really aware of these feature updates. this is difficult. Can you please provide a disable function to a whole space? 

[Gustav_Jensen]

Please disable this asap !
Our spaces are flooded with "drafts", most of them just "Untitled" with no content, but also seems that if you move a page, it leaves an unpublished version in the previous location, and looks like when it autosaves it creates unpublished pages.

These are actually not drafts, but some kind of bug in Confluence, that creates these pages

I am not spending hours/days on cleaning up the mess, because Confluence was/is faulty, disable the feature now, or cleanup the mess it has created

[Gustav_Jensen]

Please advise on how to disable this "feature" asap.

It has been going on for weeks now, the spaces are flooded with "drafts".

Not drafts that we have created but it is some error in Confluence that creates these

Confluence is because of this bug/feature almost wothless now

This needs attention !

[Mandy Ross]

Hello Confluence users! I'm happy to let you know that @Sam Ugulava is holding an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on August 31 at 8am US Pacific time. She and @Matt Reiner _K15t_ will be there to answer the questions posed in the comments here and take a few questions from you. Please register to participate: 

https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-atlassian-ask-me-anything-presents-confluence-findable-drafts-ama/

Thanks! 

[Gustav_Jensen]

Why not just write here how to disable this ? 

It is not showing drafts created by me as a user but garbage created by Confluence for years

PLEASE ADVISE HOW TO DISABLE THIS !

I HAVE MORE GARBAGE THAN ACTUAL CONTENT NOW !!!!!

I CAN NOT MANUALLY DELETE 100s OF GARBAGE FILES

PLEASE RESPOND ASAP !!!!!!

CAN ANYONE READ WHAT IS BEING POSTED HERE ?????

[Mandy Ross]

@Gustav_Jensen Gustav, we're so sorry your experience with findable drafts is frustrating. Members of the Confluence team will be reaching out to you via email to set up a call and work with you to resolve the issue with drafts on your instance. Please hang tight, help is on the way!

[Steve Kavin]

Although a great feature for guys like me. Like i have to manage work load of many company and industries like furnace machine a big firm and many more. But

It is really important to have a overview of Draft pages but also Unpublished changes.

To become digital hygiene on the confluence site, it should be great that a confluence admin (or perhaps also the space admin) could get a overview of draft and unpublished changes from other users.

[S_ Francoeur]

Is there an existing Suggestion we could vote for to be able to toggle/filter this feature in the page tree?

Meanwhile, let's vote for :

• [CONFCLOUD-71270] Ability to bulk delete Confluence User Page Drafts

• [CONFCLOUD-70244] Ability to bulk delete drafts 
• [CONFCLOUD-72450] Delete drafts from 'Recent' page  

• [CONFCLOUD-35921] Administrators should be able to see and delete drafts from all users

As for identifying pages with “Unpublished Changes”, please consider voting for [CONFCLOUD-69980] Unpublished changes are not indicated on the new navigation as a first step in the right direction...

...and I agree with @Steve Kavin that Confluence admins and space admins (of Communal spaces as a minimum) should be able to identify all pages with “Unpublished Changes” in the spaces they control...

[Mandy Ross]

Here is a recording of this session for those of you who are interested! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-NqJWprZSo

[Mark Thompson]

I should've went to the AMA but believe I had a conflict.  I actually liked this.  Good information that people here should watch.  

Here is my suggestion for the tree.  Have a drafts folder in the tree.  I would hope that wouldn't be too difficult and would keep all the drafts centrally located without cluttering up the tree.  It's not a huge issue for me.  I tend to keep my list of drafts small.  

I agree with the statements in the AMA about there being confusion whether drafts were visible because they were in my tree.   Unpublished updates/drafts could be better explained for new users.   My problem is when things aren't explained on roll out that I get pinged or have clean up because of it.  Generally speaking I like confluence but some of the recent changes are Jira-like in how they were pushed out.  That isn't a good thing.  I fully understand how product decisions are made.  This team is doing a better job.  I at least feel like you're listening.

The auto creation of personal spaces didn't roll out well.  I really felt like the admins were ignored there. That's what I mean by a Jira-like rollout.   

[Ben Garcia]

Is there a way to disable this feature yet or until the bulk draft delete feature is available? 

[Eric Hamilton]

@Sam Ugulava  I would also love to see a Findable Unpublished Changes feature.  Having that grey status box of "UNPUBLISHED CHANGES" in the Page Tree and on the Page Cards would be a wonderful visual clue as to which pages I have edited, but not yet published.  I would happily vote for that ticket if it exists.