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

[Mazen Arar]

The fix is easy, but the editor problems have existed since day one!

Formatting issues - Enable paste same as Microsoft: Keep source formatting, destination formatting, paste as text (no formatting). How hard is this?

Freezing issue are frequent during editing, not to mention, updates that take a long time to enter are not saved!

Fix the above and the product is improved!

[Daniam Ali Castellanos T_]

Every
Fricking
Time

Sometimes when, my productivity is being slain by Confluence , I fantasy of pulling a GameSpot-kinda-situation with these guys.

Because, They, Deserve it.

You don't make Awful software and then , screw absolutely everyone who's competent enough to have an edge.
Feels like, they Do It on purpose, to make everyone equally dumb and work at snail speed.

[Alan Wendt]

You can't deny it's a new experience!

[Daniel Everett]

Similarly, there does exist the md2cf tool for publishing markdown files to Confluence.  A workflow that requires all documentation to be stored as MD files in your Git repo and published with md2cf might be the way to go.

[mwittie]

Dear Confluence Team,

By now Markdown is a well-understood standard familiar to, oh just about every single one of your users. Please just base Confluence on it and let me use it like a human being. Preferably through an API, so that I can use the text editor of my choice. If you have to provide WYSIWYG, they exist for Markdown too.

How do you make tools for developers and not support these features? 

Mike

[Daniel Everett]

I can't even get numbered lists to work with an entry that is a nested list - the outer list always ends up restarting the numbering at 1 for the next item after the one with the nested list in it!  This stuff is trivial if you use a mark up language instead of the dreaded WYSIWYG.

[Jaime Hablutzel]

I just dont understand why is Attlasian releasing such a shit of editor. Atlassian products used to be great (really great) and now I have to tell all the customers I persuaded to use Confluence that soon they will need to migrate to another product. I just dont know to what product yet. Fuck Atlassian, what happened inside your company?, did the management changed and now it is only full of morons?.

[elliot.newton]

@Jeff_Kelly esp if you want to put and image inbetween a step. Absolute nightmare. I've taken to manually typing them.

[Tim]

Agreed.

Sadly that better way is a Google Doc? How come they and Microsoft can achieve live editing while Atlassian is stuck in the stone age.

*"Better" being a relative term here. What's better than the worst? Most everything!

[James Craig Livingston]

The editor is clunky and slow.

My biggest complaint is, the inability to do a quick save and continue editing. Having to publish and then reenter edit mode (slow), just makes the experience worse.

And, I tend to have too many tabs open. Many times I've been working on a page, switch to some other task, and close the tab. No warning, nothing. Work gone.

There's got to be a better way.

[Marcin Kwiecien]

The new Confluence editing is terrible.
Deleted borders for pictures (why??), this is terrible.
Cannot simply insert a table with as many columns/rows as I want the way I could do that EASILY before.
Now I have to add a default table and do a lot of clicking.

Very disappointing.

[thomas menzel]

i just hope that they dont kill the jira markdown editor in favor of the same crap that we have in confluence.....

[Ricardo Clements]

Interesting Post by Atlassian about sunk cost fallacy.. from all the feedback I have seen about the new editor.. it might appear that the sunk cost fallacy is at work within Atlassian . https://www.linkedin.com/posts/atlassian_sunk-cost-fallacy-when-we-cant-help-but-activity-6572109100824567808-i_nD

[Dan Altemyr]

What annoys me the most with the editor is that whenever you type in anything that slighltly resembles an email addres or an URL, or a file path, the editor automatically assumes that it actually IS such an address, even though it really isn't, and happily creates a clickable link for it, and it is almost impossible to get rif of it. Yes, you can click on it in the editor and click "UNLINK", but in many cases, the link remains, or it reappears of you only merely touch the line where it is written. 

[Kaz]

been using confluence for oh so many years and I've noticed why lots of people hate it and go back to word or powerpoint.

My 2 cents:

1. Word and PP give the user the ease and flexibility to edit and see the changes immediately, something Confluence doesn't (like everyone mentioned). But like everything else, confluence requires time and effort to make things work, something that doesn't happen. Spend hours building a pretty PP and everyone is happy, spend a couple of hours for a proper confluence page and everyone loses their mind!

2. Unique page names: You can have multiple word/pp/excel docos that have the same name but in different folders, but in Confluence you can't. If I create a page with a same page name but put it in a different parent page within the same space, it loses it's mind. Don't tell me that a Space is like a folder and everything under it sits in the same folder coz if that's how it is structured, it just adds to the frustration and even minor issues like wysiwyg become show stoppers

3. Some macros need to be editable in the view page as well. Eg: Status - A user shouldn't have to edit an entire page to change the status of 1 thing. if you have wysiwyg in edit mode, maybe this is a non-issue

Remember to read the flip side of the issues I raised and how to address them Atlassian.

Edit: Allow us to cancel our changes in the page, Closing a page doesn't discard the changes and the next time an edit is made anywhere, that popup with options to "continue editing, view change or discard" just makes the user wonder if there was anything that was done. If you need to know what a cancel button does, just look at the code for this message's edit window, it has 2 buttons - Cancel and Publish. See what Cancel does and implement that.

[Phillip George]

Looks like this has been an ongoing theme for years??

I would think that companies would listen to their customers and offer what they are looking for.  Oh wait, customer service went out the window years ago and we must conform to what is provided and not what is requested / wanted by the customers.

I'm trying to center a table that has 4 columns and 13 rows that includes a header row.

I can't seem to find an easy way to do this, Indenting doesn't work, The Centering option doesn't work.

We shouldn't have to add a bunch of add ins or macros in order to complete such a simple task.

If I had on option to use any other application I would, but I don't, this is the Application our company chose.

[Steven Knudsen]

So agree. And very unhappy that I recommended to a brand new customer that we do all the doc work in Confluence. I feel I just hurt that customer.

[Richard Penner]

Clearly people who know markdown dislike the WYSIWYG editor; why not let us type in markdown? Make it some obscure setting if you don't want to confuse novices, but at least understand that your audience is using GitHub regularly and finds this editor to be vastly inferior to just typing the markdown themselves. Frankly, the comment box I'm typing this in is a superior experience.

[rhainesbrainshark]

I cannot figure out how to make a nested list.

This is not a complicated document structure by any means, I remember being taught how to create document drafts in this manner at around 10 years old in school. If I had been forced to use this editor, I would have failed that unit.

Absolutely unacceptable.

[Alan Wendt]

I keep winning awards and badges from Atlassian for my constant complaints about how disgusting their software is :)  You can tell they're really listening, huh?

[tharbaugh]

I'm supposed to be creating documentation for a meeting.  Instead I just spent the last 45 minutes reading about how terrible the WYSIWYG editor is ... so that I could procrastinate using the WYSIWYG editor because it is so terrible.

This thing is TERRIBLE and it has been ever since it was foisted upon the users under the guise that it would simplify and improve everything.

I can only hope that the horrible editor will cause enough customers to abandon ship that it will force Atlassian to bankruptcy.  Then, whoever buys what remains, can fire all the management and finally care about customers and software that is productive.

[Daniam Ali Castellanos T_]

The year's 2021 .
I have come to the point where I just want to add another complain to this thread.
This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me (even blogspot editor's better), never in my life thought I'd ever feel so dumb and unproductive while documenting.

[Daniel Everett]

Not only is it broken, it takes far longer to produce documentation with a WYSIWYG editor as compared to mark-up (my own experiments say 4-10 times as long).

[Ruud Geldhof]

Does Atlassian use confluence themselves? because its insane how crappy this is. just spent 10 minutes trying to succesfully copy paste a table. 
The UX is a joke and nobody should pay for this.
Confluence: "hey you want to do something with this table cell? here's a menu"
Also Confluence: "Oh i see your mouse is now going for the dropdown menu, let me put it somewhere where your mouse is NOT"
Do you guys have any QA on this? because it's littered with this kind of low quality, low effort nonsense.

[Mathieu Gagne]

Not to necro-post but I completely agree, still a major problem.