The Confluence editor is TERRIBLE. What can be done for cloud/hosted customers?

[rhainesbrainshark]

Joao, what does MSWord have anything to do with the confluence editor?

People aren't complaining that the new editor is too complex. They're complaining that it is actually just broken. Because it is, completely broken.

[David Greene]

Cannot upvote this enough.

[Joao Correia]

Just wait until you see the new ...

[laas29]

The worst specially with lists.

[Alan Wendt]

I've earned 5 Badges complaining about this grotesque piece of software, so there's that :)

[Daniam Ali Castellanos T_]

@Simon Lewis  This has become a rant thread, they never fixed the product, they are unwilling to change it for a better or rewrite from scratch, so. I'm glad to have a community that equally hates this.

[Tim Lewis]

I hate to pile on, but I am seeing enough problems with the editor that I now cannot in good faith say I would choose to use the product if given the choice. Just one example: I cut a list of bulleted items from a Word doc, I paste in Confluence... and the last item is missing. I do the ctrl-V into another app, say Notepad, vim, or whatever, and I see the entire list pasted. I suspect this may be to do with how Word encodes bullets, but ultimately this comes down to Confluence discarding data, which is simply unacceptable. Things like this are common enough use cases, perhaps THE most common use cases, that it is not good enough for Atlassian to take the default position (by not addressing the bugs properly) that users need to find crazy work arounds like "cut, paste-into-another-app, select again, cut-again, then paste into Confluence". That is beyond ridiculous. There are so many good things about Atlassian products, but these sorts of unreliability and idiosyncrasies pose a risk to getting work done properly and reliably. Having a reliable editor is a fundamental feature of any product like this ; Atlassian need to wake up and make sure the editor is rock-solid reliable or they risk eroding their reputation and brand.

[Jakub Fiser]

I take my statement back - there is indeed one thing that is worse than Confluence wysiwyg editor: the JIRA EDITOR. 

I just got this lovely error: (highlights by me)

We couldn't save your content

It may contain formatting we don't recognize. Try removing the formatting before saving

What kind of error is that? I only used formatting provided by the editor itself (i.e. I clicked the buttons) and now I don't even know where the error is. I have a rather large bug report and I cannot save it and no way of knowing where the "error" might be.

What am I supposed to do? Rewrite the entire bug report hoping the error won't prevail? Going line-by-line trying to work around the buggy thing?

This wouldn't  have happened if I could just use a simple Markdown.

Thanks, Atlassian, you're doing a really bad job.

[Katherine Niendorf]

Frustrated.

[Christian Gough]

The WYSIWYG editor is total garbage. This debacle has been going on for years! Shameful. Better tools must exist at this point (then anything by Atlassian, if they continue to inflict this editor upon us.)

[Bruno Bronosky]

BTW, in order to get things as simple as <code> blocks for the inline code block above, I had to use Chrome Developer Tools to edit the DOM of the TinyMCE iframe. Some changes require that I alter the tinyMCE javascript object in memory to edit the valid_children, valid_classes, valid_elements, and valid_styles. It should not be this difficult.

https://www.tinymce.com/docs/configure/content-filtering/#valid_children

[Gregory Van Den Ham]

There's always room for feedback, and room for improvement.  Cloud has some limitations because of the way Atlassian maintains and upgrades that environment.  The need there is to be consistent across many instances.

Have you thought about providing the founders feedback?  You might get a response - but certainly, I'd suggest proposing a solution with your feedback so they can take that back to the team and make change happen.

[Mallee Morris]

I keep watching videos and following links from Atlassian folks, and they are exasperating. One guy was like..."oh I love panels and use them all the time, they make my pages look so professional". Always optimistic I diligently jumped in to macros with excitement to find this magical tool that I had overlooked.  The panel macro just inserts text "lozenges" that you can fill with a few different pastel colors and preset icons.  6 color choices I think, and you can't change the icons as far as I can tell.  

Another guy from Atlassian argued that keeping the editor so "lean" is purposeful to make sure that Confluence is "easy to use for anyone in the company".  We have had Word since 1983, I think we can handle setting our own font size or line spacing.  Let me go back in and face the peril!

Apparently we would all keel over with stress if we were allowed to choose our own hex colors.  Meanwhile, if I create an action item the "location" in the task report will only take me to the meeting notes page, not the location within the page.  Now that is a lean enhancement that I could actually use.

[mwittie]

Markdown please. Are you guys making tools for developers, or not?

[Scott Prive]

To mirror the seriousness which Atlassian takes this thread, I propose they gut the code completely, leaving only the following features.

1. Automatic conversion of Github markup
2. Editor with 1 parameter only: Github URL to import
   1. Confluence automatically checks for new versions of the GH document to display.
3. Clicking "Edit" shall redirect the browser to the GitHub repo, adding the necessary "edit" URL parameters so it can be edited in GitHub.
4. That's it. Go home early.

At my last job a talented engineer wrote a tool that let you push GitHub markup to a target Confluence page, and rewrite the markup in the process. Probably took her a few days to write.

GH markup is far more collaborative and doesn't eat your content if you blink while typing.

[Brian]

A little late to the party, but I just sat here and got increasingly furious.
I was simply trying to edit a [confluence-]page that contains many URLs.
To that purpose I used the soon-to-be insanely expensive built-in Confluence "editor".  
I clicked th first "insert hyperlink to external" icon and inserted the link.  That worked...

Then I though I'd just copy the linkk because the next 4 links looked almost identical. 

And spent what felt like 521374.99 hours getting more and more furiously irritated over the damned useless little excuse for a "editor"   -   It was simply impossible for me to grasp what the intelligent people behind the editor must have thought should be the process of entering multiple URLS in the same page.,. Mostly I ended u AGAIN with a URL with new name, but to the same address I copied from.  

Intuitive?! I think NOT. 

Geez it is a lousy "editor"!
Still.
In 2021. 

[Gopi_Rajaseharan]

I am now having second thoughts about recommending Confluence to my new employer. I have to agree with a lot of user's frustration here. I remember using Confluence and JIRA well at a previous role a few years ago at a company that built major fundraising software. The Atlassian products felt seamless to use. So I convinced my new employer to set up a Confluence paying account a couple of months ago. I was going to suggest JIRA in an effort to move away from TFS issue tracking but have since decided against it.

I have felt nothing but frustration at doing little things in Confluence.. such as getting the Table of Contents macro to work. I have a page with a couple of headings and I expect the macro to work without issues. But after a lot of time hogging, only an empty TOC is rendered. I don't want to hear about zoom size, browser compatibility or anything like that for a resolution. As a Developer myself, hearing that sort of thing evokes guffaws. There just seems to be a lot of clicking around Confluence with little in the way of Aha moments.

After searching for knowledge base articles specific to the Table of Contents issue, I then searched for user complaints on Confluence in general and arrived at this page. I am on an important software development project and will get back to Confluence in a few weeks. But I can tell from the lack of motivation in one other user to use Confluence with whom I evaluated the product, we likely will move on to another product. Thankfully, we haven't created a lot of content. We couldn't.

[RicardoAraya]

Atlassian is making weird efforts, I have been using cloud (Confluence / Jira) for a long time and I never have seen a release that has so many bugs...

But they keep releasing features no one is asking...

Lots of add-ons macro are not working because of the new editor limitations

The creation of issues from confluence is full of bugs..  

And then again... Who cares about NextGen projects? Just solve these obvious and basic needs first.

[Fred J]

This - The new editor is garbage.

[Peter Kidson]

ophiloye
Whatever the motivation, the new editor is plainly vastly inferior to the old : dumbed down and inflexible.

So why can't the old one just be allowed to continue alongside the new ?

[Alan Wendt]

This new WSYWIG jail is grotesque for anyone who's ever used an editor more powerful than Notepad.  Why would you do this to a community of programmers?

[Peter Kidson]

For those who want the power and flexibility of the old editor rather then the simplicity and shoehorning of the new editor,  WHY CAN'T THE OLD EDITOR BE RETAINED ?  

[Ricardo Clements]

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/257955 the issue is the elimination of options.. Adoption in an organization has little to do with using the editor and the cheerleaders in the organization reap considerable agility and prowess when you provide powerful tools like wiki markup and a powerfull suite of macros.  Now adding options is great but if you take away the tooling of the power user, now you handicap your most loyal fans with a nonsensical view that users will flock to Confluence cause the editor is wysiwig?  The power of Confluence is the dynamic liinking, collaborative content, some of the powerful macros and the flexibility to organize content to suit the ever changing perspectives different stakeholders  adopt.

The adoption problem is that the world has been numbed by MS Office, Sharepoint and the like...  a problem I refer to as "Knowledge Islands".  Most people are unaware of how isolated they have been packaging their knowledge and as such failing to benefit from it. 

If the goal is to address Adoption then perhaps a page from the VMWare Fusion playbook could yield considerably better results without alienating your loyal base... What about a tool that migrates a sharepoint site into a confluence space?  Or creates meta indexes of the file structure (maybe even extracts a bit from each file in an attempt to assist reader?)  Any such approach which would "re-package" knowledge islands into a form which could be collaborated on, dynamically referenced or illustrate other valuable capabilities of Confluence (and or other Atlassian tooling) would be a neon WOW compoared to the "metoo" wyswig checkbox.

Atlassian has had some great tools in the past and unfortunately successive releases of Confluence are being handicapped...

Most of us power users are your biggest cheerleaders for adoption in the business world, help us out instead of handicapping us.  Lets focus on the why challenges of adoption: I have found that most people don't work in collaborative ways, and once a person begins to incorporate collaborative work habits, their appreciation of Confluence explodes.  in the 20+ years I have been a wiki cheerleader wysiwig has never been the obstacle..

[nigelgilbert]

Jira's text editor is bad.  I would like markdown.  I feel I waste a lot of time trying to take screenshots and do simple things like bold and new line characters.

[Nicholas DiPiazza]

still so bad

how can developers wiki markup needs not be priority 1?

now stuck with this awful piece of junk. recommending immediate cancellation.