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Keyboard shortcuts are great if you use a tool every day.
But the real beauty of Confluence was its ease of use for people who perhaps only edited a page a few times a year. Most things you needed to do were right there on the screen so you did not need t be a "power User"
Now I have to wave my mouse all over the screen thinking "where has that option gone?" (especially as ! work in one CLOUD system and one SERVER system!!)
Then click
Then think again "which option does what I want?"
Then click again
Then depending on which option I need, click again
then finally click <<Publish>>
So compare that wasted time and extra clicks with the habitual 1-second move of the mouse to the bottom of the screen (why not just put that up at the top of the screen or on a fixed slide bar or something)
SRERIOUSLY.
All these new editor changes to "improve the User experience" has made it FAR more annoying.
Relying on us knowing a couple of hundred keyboard shortcuts to do such easy things is simply a lack of understanding of Users. I manage a global instance of some 6000 Users who are all spasmodic editors at most a few times a year, and of ages from 20's to 70's.
If we can't see it, we probably won't remember use it.
So all those discussions your product teams had was clearly a waste of time!
Please ... just bring back the old Editor functionality and go back to your discussions and drawing board until you truly have a better functionality than the old system and that doesn't destroy the User experience. Your Users should not be treated as suffering guinea pigs
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@Rodney Hughes How do you have a cloud instance with 6,000 users when the maximum is 5,000? Most of our users use it all the time so not an issue for us as long as they give us all the functionality back.
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A SERVER system with a rapidly growing 6000+ Users in thousands of different companies world-wide for our industry association where the Users collaborate to write industry guidelines for the power industry. Some Users might only be editing pages a few times a year, some perhaps a few hundred times. THE reason we selected Confluence was its extreme User friendliness and helpfulness for Users with no training on the system as such an association needs.
A CLOUD system with a much limited number of Users that I assign for my own clients from project‑to‑project who are generally new to Confluence - certainly low familiarity with it. At the time I implemented my own company instance, CLOUD at that time was almost identical functionality as SERVER back then. CLOUD has so much cut out of it "to improve the User experience", especially the last "slash and burn" changes last year, I am now reluctant to use for my next projects because it will just confuse and hinder my clients rather than help them in our mutual collaboration of the documents I am preparing for them.
I have to walk back one of the things I said in my comment of 9/15/2020. You do not have to choose between notifying watchers and adding a change note. The interface is confusing (anyway, it confused me) but now I understand how it works. Assume you are ready to publish. Here is what to do in a variety of circumstances:
You DON'T need to add a comment and DO want to notify all watchers:
Click "Publish"
You DON'T need to add a comment and DON'T want to notify watchers:
Open ... menu and select "Publish without notifying watchers"
You DO need to add a comment AND...
You DO want to notify watchers:
Open ... menu and select "Publish with version comment", fill in comment and check "Notify Watchers" (it is checked by default so no big deal.)
You DON'T want to notify watchers
Open ... menu and select "Publish with version comment", fill in comment and uncheck "Notify Watchers"
So you can make a decision about notifying watchers independently from adding a comment.
By contrast, here is what I used to do when I decided to publish my changes:
Go to the bottom of the page.
Fill in a version comment or not.
Check or uncheck "notify watchers."
Click Publish.
I have not left the page or had to memorize what is on a menu.
However, I was pleased that I could include comments like "fixed typo" without forcing other people to know about it!
This is the kind of b.s. you have to deal with when products go "cloud only." With server-based, on-premise products you have more control over preventing existing features from just up and walking away. 3 more years of a peaceful existence and then we're going to have to put up with crap like this...
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Don't forget that if you currently have a SERVER licence, you do not ever have to abandon it. Just do one last version upgrade before the end of SERVER support and use that forever.
@Jean-Marc Pascal - comments are never part of an initial publish for a new page, the ability to comment on an updated page only appears from revision 2 onwards.
Ok thanks @Peter O_Sullivan I will try it this way. But it makes sense to comment from the first version, e.g. to indicate that it is still a draft or what topics are not addressed yet or to indicate it is an official release.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
June 3, 2021 edited
@Jean-Marc Pascal We have recognized that comments would be useful for the first version. The team is thinking through how to include this in the future.
FWIW here is an implementation I would love to see:
Each page could be configured to require comments on publication
If a page is configured to require comment then when a user clicks on Publish or uses the shortcut a modal prompts the user to add a comment.
The modal would indicate the version that will be used. e.g. last saved 1.5 will become 1.6 but would also allow the user to click "Major" update which would increment the X in a X.Y version convention, e.g. instead of 1.6 it will be 2.0.
the modal would allow user to specify "save as draft". note the subtlety of "save" vs. "publish"
1-3 are high priority, 4 is medium and I could understand the complexity of doing this since if others update after the draft is saved how will that be managed when the user finally goes to publish the page.
Looks to me like this feature is broken in case more than 1 user is editing a page. The publish menu is not visible in case the other user(s) have unpublished changes.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 6, 2022 edited
ACK! I just saw a few comments.
@Jesper Ungermann Christensen The request for admins to have control over making version comments required is known by the team. I will reshare though.
@Amanda Milko We have heard from our customers who use comments for regulatory reasons that being able to edit the comments is not good for audit purposes. Nonetheless, I'll share your comment/question with the team.
@Jean Waucomont I'd recommend you contact your admin to route your bug submission to our Support team. They will need more information (exact steps to replicate) in order to help you.
@Traci Wilbanks Could it be possible to add time-stamped comments to the original version comments? I understand the need for traceability and accountability, but the reason I asked is that on occasion, we forget to include a version comment. This makes it confusing to find a past version we're looking for or pick out the differences at a glance.
Is this still an option? I'm not seeing this any longer. I simply have a publish button and the options/extras menu does not show the additional publish options.
This is still a huge step back from how it was in the old editor as most users will forget to put a comment, while before with the comment box right next to the publish button they would see it and go oh yeah I should put a comment. Can you at least give a means to add a comment later so they can be added after someone is force to spend large amounts of time trying to find a specific edit with a binary search of the history on a page, so it can be found later.
@Traci Wilbanks any update on this issue? It is an uphill fight, reminding everybody to use the Publish with Version Comment feature. Is there a way now to make it mandatory?
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