Also Jessica from the Confluence product team has responded to some of the feedback here already, and will be back with another update in February. I know the team is also reading this thread, even if they don't have time to respond to every single post.
Definitely let me know if I can help track down anything missing from the editor roadmap, or answer any other questions. I'm not on the product team but definitely here to help where I can!
1. inability of Confluence TOC to display in Jira Service Desk
2. inability of the new editor to nest TOC ZONE macro and NUMBERED Headings. - this is required for the TOCZ to display in Jira Service Desk, as we MUST have Numbered Headings.
3. inability to control the formatting of PDFs from the new editor.
4. inability to control graphics in the new editor.
People gets angry cause when you go on thread to complain about an issue you get totally ignored by the community managers , and if you complain to much you've got banned , this is disrespectful for your customers. Atlassian didn't let us the choice to move to the new editor , as cloud users we are depending of atlassian updates , its mean that every updates atlasian push will affect each one of us , and as always with atlassian updates , they have some nice news additions but they come with a fuckton of issues , and its feel like we are just some beta testers for your updates , we paid for confluence and we wish to be treated like real customers , its mean having at least a little control of the product we've paid . The questions is why atlassian have deployed the new editor so soon ? Your team must have know (better than us) the issues and the missing features that have disappear with the old editor. It is the same problems with the next gen project of Jira that have some real issues and missing features but unlike the editor we can still (and hopefully) use old gen project. Even on the roadmap you've linked you can see that there is a lots of missings feature , so why didnt atlassian teams take their times and finish the new editor before releasing it ? I know that you are just a community manager and that you can't do anything about this but please understand that this in infuriating .
The only thing we can do is to complain , so at least let us do this .
@Lucas Stroutinski I counted the features added to and missing from the new editor in the roadmap again this morning. In the name of improvements, 21 features were removed and seven were added. (This isn't counting all the bugs and broken bits, these are just things that someone decided we didn't need anymore and removed.)
About half of the removed features are on the short-term backlog. (When is the "short-term"? Who knows...)
The thing is, bugs are forgivable. No one will ever iron all the bugs out of software pre-release. They just won't. Ignored enhancement requests are infuriating but understandable.
Features actively removed from a product? That is a decision one or more people have made. It's a conscious effort to change the product/service. It has greatly affected the way their customers work. The team or person who made that decision need criticising. They are clearly not being critical of their own actions, so the people affected by them (us), are doing it instead. (After all, we are testing the product for you, what's a bit more work...)
If you marketed the current Fabric editor to us, we wouldn't buy it because it doesn't do what we need it to. But, because we bought the old editor, we're using and paying for it. And many of us are locked into it. Our criticisms of the people responsible need hearing. They are no more a personal attack than the bastardising of the new editor is an attack on us, the customers. They are a response in kind.
Yes, there's no place for threats or abusive language, but what was Kelvin banned for (this time)? Comparing the Product team to royalty who see themselves as too high and mighty to interact with us grovelling peasants? That sounds pretty accurate to me. This shouldn't be some feudalistic relationship, where we're expected to be pathetically happy with whatever Atlassian sees fit to grant to us, but that's how it feels. Is this an attack on Atlassian employees? No, it's using a metaphor to describe the way we the customers see ourselves as being treated.
If you want to control the narrative, you have to engage with the characters, not just silence the critics. This is how we see you, Atlassian. We're giving you the chance to change our minds. You say you listen to feedback, you say you recognise that what you're doing negatively affects us, but then you do it anyway. You say you don't have time to respond to each comment, but then you only interact with the positive ones. You promise transparency, but things are no clearer now than they were six months ago.
I (and others) take time out of the day to write long, detailed, and usually civil, polite, and helpful comments providing explanations about problems with the software and about why we are responding the way we are. I get ignored. People respond with anger or sarcasm. They get ignored or banned. We're giving you a lot of feedback on the product and the product direction, but you are ignoring it. If the customer experience doesn't matter, just come out and say it. Update your values. Let us know that we're just shouting into the void. But if you're genuinely trying to improve the product, how about admitting you've made some mistakes, recognising that your existing customers are suffering because you are compounding bad decisions, and working with us to find a way of updating the editor while letting us do our jobs too.
Confluence is designed for collaboration. It's no surprise that the quality of the product/service has deteriorated, because the company appears to have lost the spirit of collaboration.
"Who pays the piper calls the tune"? Nah, you'll get what you're given.
A comment from Sunny over on Jira ticket 65695 (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65695). It looks like our feedback is slowly working. And when I say slowly, we're talking erosion slowly. So maybe this time next decade Confluence will have caught back up to where it was before they switched the new editor on... PROGRESS! /s
Thank you for your feedback on bringing back the "What's Changed" comment box when publishing a page in the new editor. To set the right expectations, in our public editor roadmap here https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html you can see that our focus in the short/medium term is on bringing back some of the key documentation features like linking to an undefined page, linking text to an attachment, linking images etc.
You are still able to use Page History and Compare Versions to provide more objective and reliable logs of what has been changed. We'll revisit this suggestion once we get through some of the more burning areas of feature gap feedback we've been getting for the new editor. Thank you again for your feedback.
I am looking for other macros that we have in older version of confluence. Like {code} page properties for tables etc.. Does any one has these macros working in new editor ?
@Bert Stevens - Typically, when we have these issues, it CAN be from other add-ons in the browser. Try using (Chrome) Canary with no add-ons, for example. Chrome would seem to be the most stable of all the brands of browsers due to its excellent Javascript handling, but that is challenged when you add in third party extensions. In spite of being less tested (alpha level), Canary still can work well for lots of stuff. https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/
You can also remove as many extensions as you can stand...
IN an earlier comment, an Atlassian tech comment was posted about a specific feature:
"... you can see that our focus in the short/medium term is on bringing back some of the key documentation features like linking ... etc.... We'll revisit this suggestion once we get through some of the more burning areas of feature gap feedback we've been getting for the new editor..."
Pretty astounding that a company as SMART as Atlassian is having to admit to "bringing back" lost features, which caused "burning areas of feature gap" that you are getting.
How was this NOT anticipated? Or was it, and this was intentional? Is Atlassian willing to sacrifice swaths of existing paid/committed customers to implement some new "minimal function" marketing strategy?
Somebody please explain how a company can be so arrogant as to replace a functional editor with one that has these egregious issues? A simple focus group of a cross-section of users types could have identified what is disposable and what is not? Even a voluntary survey or other method of ENGAGING your PAYING customers would have prevented this massacre.
Does anyone in management even care? Maybe the co-CEOs - @Mike Cannon-Brookes@Scott Farquhar - could jump on this thread and provide us with some insight into lessons learned?
@Ira Chandler - the same company that had 93 outstanding items in Jira last time I talked to them. Including simple things like showing web links in tickets. At work I keep getting accused of not putting the required links in my tickets and then I have to have them show me their screen and I walk them through reverting to the older Jira so they can see that I did indeed provide the links they required. I've lost count how many people I've had to walk through this process.
@Venkata Mulam Lots of macros were intentionally removed from the new editor. If we're lucky, some of them might get put back. If we're really lucky, some of them might work the same as they used to.
@Ira Chandler It's the closest we've come to an admission that maybe they just completely undercooked and overf***ed the whole thing. Also, this seems to be a copy and paste response. Sunny posted it in the description of the Jira ticket, Avinoam used it in an email response to someone's Feedback to the Founders (how'd he wrangle that promotion?!)
I'd love to see the thought process by which they ended up in this mess.
Also, thank you to the people who liked one of my comments from the 10th of January. If you hadn't, I'd never have noticed that a moderator had stealth edited it a few days ago (over two weeks after I posted it). I have now edited the comment with a response.
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
February 5, 2020 edited
@Lucas Stroutinski sorry, I didn't see your message earlier! I'm also sorry you feel ignored by the community managers. Indeed we aren't on the product team, just users of the product, but we do try to keep the conversation constructive and are certainly here if you need us.
You definitely are entitled to be frustrated and complain. We just ask in the process you avoid personally attacking Atlassians or each other, and keep our guidelines in mind.
And I do believe more about Analytics is coming in the February product update.
The "community managers" should understand that frustration expressed accidentally against "them" is actually against "it" (the company). You mods are just the poor suckers that they throw out here to attempt to maintain civility, without the authority, access, or standing to actually DO anything. You are in the same situation as WE are. You must be privately as upset with your employer as we are, but are unable to express it. Frustrating, I am sure.
I have heard powerless employees, one after another, try to explain why the company JUST DOES NOT CARE that I cannot display Confluence pages in Jira Service Desk with a Table of Contents. A four year old bug that the company just can't get the cojones to stand up and FIX.
All I get are platitudes, explanations of the stinking lousy VOTING process, and NEVER any acceptance of responsibility or understanding that the use of our complex docs IN JIRA SD was a reason we pay the big bucks every month, and spent the time to build our docs in Confluence.
I frankly, would NOT work for a company that acted like Atlassian. If ANYONE in my small company came to me with a bug the magnitude of mine, these, or the HORRIBLE roadmap decisions, I would be obligated to respond with actual FIXES. I could not live with ignoring MY installed base. But when that is only hundreds of customers, maybe I just NEED THEM more than you do. OH, I mean, more than YOUR COMPANY does. See. Inadvertent personal reference. Deep apologies. Maybe I just RESPECT them more than YOUR COMPANY does?
A four year old bug is frustrating but it's only accumulated 24 votes in four years so I think you might be an edge case. It sucks man, but it happens.
Well, I just had the following comment deleted from a Jira ticket and got a rather long email from the team leader who deleted it telling me that I'm not allowed to post "other people's private and confidential information without their express permission".
You can now add <firstname> <lastname> to the list of Product Managers taking refuge in the "burning areas" stock answer...
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