@Tom Crowley thank you for pointing that out... not sure how it escaped me so far. As you say, there are limitations, e.g. I could not comment on a selection with a hyperlink, etc., though it offered to add the comment to the list of page comments. Still, good to know it can be done indeed.
@Monique vdB I've tried to explain this before. Most of the other users I've spoken to on here aren't trying to make your jobs harder, and I empathise with how crappy it must be reading page after page of criticism. No one wants to go to a job that other people are actively making harder.
But you have to remember that this is exactly what is happening to many of us because of these changes. @Dan Winkler got it spot on when he said that it "seems hostile". It feels like some of the features people have been using for years are now being held hostage and we're having to beg for them back, with little to no hope that they will ever return. You are actively making our jobs harder with these changes. Most of us haven't chosen this upgrade willingly.
Atlassian had a good thing with Confluence Cloud, so why are you throwing it all away? How you deal with this period of change will determine the good will you are able to restore, because right now, among several of your super-users and influencers, you are at a net zero.
And criticising the Product Team is absolutely okay. The Product Team decide what the product is going to do. Yes, it's not your fault it is buggy, that's on Development and Testing, but the Product Team decides the features to keep or cull. They have to take ownership and responsibility for the fallout.
There is a different between being critical and being abusive, a difference between pointing out faults and throwing insults. If you can't accept criticism of the team, then you will just float around in your little echo chamber, and nothing will get better. Criticism hurts, but if there is truth in it, you can't just hide away from it.
So as a user I ask my fellow users to hold back on any needless abuse and to recognise that you are people with emotions too, but that has to work both ways. You absolutely have recognise that you have made many people's jobs a lot worse, and accept that some of the anger coming your way is justified. And you have to show, through actions, that you are trying to undo the damage and listen to what we have to say.
The less we feel listened to, the more we're likely to shout. It's natural, even if it's not acceptable. How do you get someone's attention? You break taboos, you shout, you shock. These are things you learn as a child. You need to accept that as a Product Team, you have made some poor decisions. That only comes through critical thinking. But as you cherry-pick easy questions, slap "likes" all over some vapid praise of some shiny and non-essential new feature, and continue to pretend age-old bugs and enhancement requests don't exist, you weaken the core integrity of the Product, and the Product Team.
So block people, fine. Quieten the voices that are trying to guide you. Forget that ofttimes, your loudest detractors are your biggest supporters. When we go silent, it's because we no longer care, and when we no longer care, if we can, we leave, if we can't, we take this anger to other, more public forums. Consider these criticisms your lifeline. Your chance to show that you care about us, the users.
So I apologise, sincerely and unsarcastically, for any emotional upset that any of my messages might have caused, but I stand by everything I've said.
@Jean-Michel Decombe No worries! It's easy to miss things. If I can't comment on macro or link text, I try to add the comment to the nearest heading - that usually works.
To all the hard-working customer-people out there, human or otherwise—thank you for continuing to express your genuine dissatisfaction with the challenges and errors being imposed upon each of us with the new editor, which is in no way ready for production. It is a beta-quality product at best. I stand by a comment I made previously—in its current state, it is unfit for purpose.
The amazing, wonderful, and good-looking Atlassian team would do well to pay attention to its customers and the reasons behind their umbrage rather than take offence and disregard them as trolls.
@Tom CrowleyWow. That was absolutely incredible. A beautifully-crafted thesis which captures the true essence here.
@Monique vdB Regarding criticism versus abuse, I think you should apply this test: if someone calls you an adjective, is it insulting? Example (these are not directed at you or anyone):
"You are stupid." < -- abuse.
"You should feel stupid" < -- abuse.
"You are embarrassed" < -- not abuse.
"You are ashamed" < -- not abuse.
"You should feel embarrassed and ashamed" < -- not abuse; acceptable criticism.
Perhaps we should ask the Atlassian human-people how they feel about the new editor. @Monique vdB can you please tell us honestly how you feel about it? Do you feel it serves your customers well? Do you feel is it a good reflection of your company's goals and aspirations?
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
November 21, 2019 edited
Lots of thoughtfully expressed responses here, thank you for that, and for being mindful of the guidelines. I know for a fact the product team is listening and taking the responses to heart.
As far as the definition of abusive language goes, I'm not going to split hairs on the wording. (Or parts of speech, although all your examples are adjectives.) "You should feel ashamed" is a harsh thing to say that is not acceptable to direct at any fellow community member, Atlassian or not.
And Kelvin that's an interesting question that I, as a human person, will answer! I am definitely a person who doesn't like change, I would rather use an old tool that I know well, in general. Whenever there's a button like "try the new experience!" I resist clicking it as long as I can. I think I'm still on a 1990s version of Blogger.
But to answer the question, we're on the latest version of Confluence and after an initial adjustment period I have come to like it a lot. I find performance to be better, I really like the shortcuts, and it works for what I need. I also have seen it improve with every release based on user feedback. I honestly hope you have the same experience I did.
Now I feel better about less further detailed commenting as it probably would be a waste of time. If "You should feel ashamed" is considered too harsh, it is clear Atlassian staff is far too sensitive to work in this harsh industry.
Thanks for joining the conversation. I am a product manager on the Jira Cloud team, and I appreciate your feedback about Atlassian providing more guidance on successful ways that teams have set up their Jira workflows and projects.
I will take this back to the team and see if we can provide some guidance here! Jira is a powerful and flexible tool that maps to so many different ways of working - that's part of why it has been so successful. But providing some guidance on good patterns to see and draw from is a great idea.
@Taylor Wait, what? Your comments are illuminating. They appear to bear no relevance to the frustrations being vented in this thread. It may explain something about why your customers are so infuriated.
@Monique vdB Great way to begin by being honest but then sidestepping the issue. You admitted that the new editor "works for what I need." Well, guess what? The reason why so many of us are up in arms is because the new editor profoundly doesn't work for what we need—and that's after many years of using a version of the editor that does.
The nice folks at Atlassian have us at a huge disadvantage because it isn't straightforward for the majority of us to simply walk away because we are so heavily invested with your products. More fool us.
You speak of addressing Atlassian staff with respect, yet you appear unable to relate to how your customers feel like they are being treated with utter contempt.
I have no doubt that you are a lovely person. I'm sure the whole lot of you are as cool as freakin' Greenland, but something in your company processes sucks in a major way.
And, @Monique vdB, can you please tell me if, when you open a page for editing, you experience the same one-second shock as me when the editor displays the previously saved version of the page before updating inline to the current version?
If you don't see that issue (though I bet you do), I will be delighted to record as many videos of it as you wish and send them to you. It is extremely unsettling to open a page for editing and be presented with unexpected content, even just for a moment.
Someone with a heart complaint might not make it as far as actually editing the page.
It would retain the fully featured editor until the new editor was sufficiently developed to allow existing customers to migrate elegantly and without loss of long-established core functionality on which they rely.
It would work closely with customers who have complex needs, which cannot easily be met in the new framework, to reach satisfactory workarounds.
It would select a few heavy-duty customers to be early adopters while ironing out the teething problems—before finally releasing a stable, mature product into the wild.
Hi Confluence team- any chance you'll be fixing tables anytime soon? The current implementation is just super hard to use. If I were you guys, I'd take a cue from google and microsoft on how they handle tables in excel and sheets- we need things like easy keyboard navigation, better copy/paste handling, really just all the basic interactions we have in excel or sheets. Please please please. It's all I want for christmas.
@Tom Crowley expresses my exact sentiments. But I'd like to add the total lack of empathetic response (and response in general) to the decision to remove core features. My life has been turned completely upside down and have had to build my own standard wiki just to get work done. Not one person from Atlassian has acknowledged or put themselves in their customers shoes on the impact this has brought to I'm sure many others besides myself. I have also been on the platform for many years. I'm questioning now whether this will continue. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Atlassian has helped us all understand what they're capable of. What's to stop them from doing this again and perhaps permanently removing core features. It's a risk I think all businesses need to consider.
I have read through some of these comments and I would like to point out that it was indeed a major mistake for Atlassian to replace an existing product with a new version of that product that may have some new features and a nicer design, but also that has many bugs and some key features removed.
The standard process would be to let both products coexist until the new product is a worthy replacement of the old one, then to give all users enough time to migrate, maybe an additional year or so. If you look at Jira, it lets you create classic boards or next generation boards, your choice, while the next generation is still being refined. If classic Jira had been removed when next generation was launched, I think that... I don't know, I just can't even imagine what would have happened. You probably would have been the target of a class action lawsuit, and there are precedents.
Anyway, there are indeed many bugs in the new Confluence. I reported one with images in tables a while back and it has yet to be fixed. If you insert an image in a column, then insert more images in rows below, then publish the page, it will display the same image (namely, the last one inserted) in every single cell in which you had inserted images, even though they were all initially different. I wish that such a simple bug could be fixed promptly, as it has prevented me from using Confluence to publish important documentation that is really basic when you think about it... tables with images in them.
@TaylorCan you please respond to our concerns, or are you going to continue to ignore us? Does anyone at your organization care about how your customers feel?
The "/" shortcut is no easier than the "{" shortcut in the old editor. It really is inconsequential unless you're new to the editor or you are on the Atlassian payroll.
If the shortcut were changed to "/@~#]", I'd simply get used to it. I cannot, however, get used to the new editor's loss in functionality that is integral to the way we have been delivering solutions to our customers for years. It is the removal of key functionality and Atlassian's casual dismissal of its significance that is causing so many of us to lose our tempers and respond in disparaging ways.
We have used the sections, columns, and panels macros pretty heavily. Why have these been removed? Is there a replacement of some sort that I'm not seeing?
Most of what I could say has already been said by others, but I feel the same way. We are using Atlassian cloud in a small way, and also an old version of Confluence internally. I keep coming across editing features that have been taken away from the new Fabric editor, and in the roadmap are flagged with things like "Long term backlog" or "Converts completely" (i.e. cannot be done in the new editor). I have to consider, when the time comes to upgrade, if the same effort wouldn't be better spent migrating to another product.
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