Try out the new editing experience

[Michael Corvin]

Yet Another Aggravating LOSS of Functionality in 'sucky new experience':  block indent/outdent of several paragraphs is missing?

Pasting in an RTF bullet list, the tab key is not consistently indenting individual lines and, worse, the block indent/outdent formatting buttons are not available (for bullet/number lists or just regular paragraphs).

I'm all for 'clean UIs', but removing key formatting functionality from the editor bar reduces utility.

[Helen Gosper]

I would like to know the rationale behind removing the block indent/outdent - please Attlasian?

[jim mason]

I'm guessing the starting point for the product team is not preserving existing functionality and then adding new or alternate features.  If it were, they would have provided documentation up front on what detail changes were planned and how existing function and formatting would be supported on new releases.

In a cloud product, we don't have any control over the updates done. At least in a server version, the customer can control the upgrades and validate the new release doesn't break critical function before updating a production environment.

[Bec Honey]

Is anyone else finding it completely mind blowing that Atlassian aren't responding to anything in this forum any longer? … 

Is there some other thread buried somewhere, where the customers are all jumping for joy about the new editing 'experience'? 

What on earth is going on? 

[jim mason]

They say the product team reads every comment in this thread. They only respond to ones they want to.

They did organize an online meeting a few weeks ago to explain the new Confluence Cloud product strategy and answer some questions at the time.

I do think they have not acknowledged :

1> that most customers are unhappy with the changes and prefer the old editor

2> over 90% of the existing content in Confluence Cloud is probably built with the old editor

3> product changes that are released on the cloud version could use better testing on the old editor and different browsers to ensure features aren't broken surprising customers

[Ricardo Clements]

100% agree that there doesnt seem to be recognition from Atlassian and since the community space seems to be failing to get their attention...

Perhaps taking this to a more public forum might get some needed attention...

Thoughts on some options

Twitter? Linkedin article? Change.org?  others??

I have been reading the complaints now for at least 5 months and have colleagues who have been complaining longer than that..

[Helen Gosper]

What I dd found surprising was the the webinar last week didn't contain any explanations. I really appreciated @Avinoam's acknowledgement of frustrations, and it was really good that that was upfront before the presentation. However,  the extent of the upset about this is such that there really needs to be a more formal explanation of the rationale behind the deprecation/'temporary' removal, etc of basic cms editing functionality.

It's got to a point where rather than a reply in this forum it's worth a separate blog or email communication from Atlassian. You can see (even leaving aside the 'noise' that these feature reductions are causing people productivity and content management issues. It would be good to see such a response occur.

[Ricardo Clements]

It would appear that many loyal advocates of Confluence (us users) have spoken audibly and for quite a while now without appropriate feedback from Atlassian.  This would be considered a classic customer experience failure at any of the companies I or any colleague has worked for.

Its unfortunate that while they have a community to help work thru issues, its value hasn't been realized as Atlassian seems quite selective in their responding to our concerns.

In this day and age it feels like the only message which gets attention is a public one...

[Michael Corvin]

This is a repeat, and perhaps more impactful, of the last 'big change' that Atlassian sprang on us a few years ago that included the deprecation of the wiki markup.  While understandable from a s/w perspective (having to maintain both markup and the underlying storage format), that was a fundamental break from the original wiki-wiki concept.

There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from many of us who were the admins and evangelists, but we lived with it.  However, there wasn't nearly the degree of brokenness and loss of basic functionality that we have slamming us in the face this time...

• no off-page image/file links configurable in editor
• indent/outdent paragraph is gone
• editor bar is unnecessarily 'compactified' (formatting options)
• MS Office and PDF viewers were broken last time I checked
• Why is fixed-width default?  Or why isn't that configurable
• Templates and Create from Template broken
• etc...

[jim mason]

I think it would be appropriate to setup a meeting with all Confluence Cloud users and the product team.   I could set this up on Zoom.

The problem is finding and reaching out in advance to all the Confluence Cloud users in advance ( 2 weeks? 4 weeks? ).

I see from the last meeting the product team shared their goals going forward.

They didn't want to find out what the customer's goals are going forward for this product.

This meeting would be of great benefit to the Atlassian product team for Confluence Cloud I'm sure. We could collectively define options that would work for the majority of customers.

[Tom Crowley]

Comments are definitely being cherry-picked for responses. My long plea for some kind of webinar/call was flatly ignored by anyone at Atlassian, and I posted it in two places. My short question about when link-able headers were going to be made available (on the webinar page) got a very quick response.

I get that they don't want to respond to what probably feels like abuse, but it's not particularly confidence inspiring, particularly when they are claiming to be listening to our requests. I suspect they are picking the quick wins, and potentially winning the battles at the cost of the war.

[Bec Honey]

@Avinoam  - Would you guys consider reassuring us (your *Paying customers!) that the 'Old Editor' isn't going to go away? 

I don't think anyone enjoys taking time out of their work day to read blog post upon blog post of negativity... we all have our jobs to get on with after all.. :)

I'm guessing we are all busy, for the most part;  fairly decent IT folk who aren't fond of this negative vibe here on this thread... *we'll leave that to the obnoxious, uneducated & childish bullies on FB & Twitter. I assure you, we are simply frustrated, *not least by the lack of response. 

I propose a compromise:  

Can this "Blank page (Old) (going away soon)" be relabeled and kept with all the previous formatting, features, macros, etc.. intact? We'll all get on with our day. Meantime you can create a different editing experience. 

Please let the customers decide if they want to use a different editing experience as opposed to a 'New Editing Experience'. 

[John M]

I am no longer able to edit any of the New Experience pages that I have permission to edit! The permissions look good. What's going on Confluence Cloud?!

It just shows me the editor but does not allow me to place the cursor anywhere inside. The formatting options are greyed out!

[Tom Crowley]

Hmm, a bit of research and there appears to be an issue editing/creating pages: https://confluence.status.atlassian.com/

[jim mason]

I had the same issue. For me, it was in Firefox.

I cleared all Atlassian cookies from browser cache and did a full restart on the browser.

Testing in Chrome or Edge I did not have the issue.

Yes, there was a breaking change made on the Confluence Cloud deployment that impacted Firefox for me.

This work around works at this point.

I'm concerned about the continuous changes on the Cloud version going forward that are not tested well enough on pages built with the old editor etc

[Tom Crowley]

Dunno whether this is linked to @John M's problem, but I can't enter text anywhere in Confluence. I can't respond to comments, search, or edit pages.

It worked fine yesterday (after the outage was resolved...)

[Tom Crowley]

Update: The workaround here resolved it: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67879

Clear all the temporary data for the page.

If you're on Chrome, you can follow the steps below:

1. Access one of the pages on Confluence where you noticed the problem;
2. Go to the browser's menu and select View -> Developer -> * Developer Tools*
3. Open the Application tab and select * Clear Storage* on the left;
4. Hit the Clear Site Data button;

[Tom Crowley]

And now I can't add images. @Avinoam When should we be reporting bugs and when are things just little blips that are likely to fix themselves? Because I'm not sure I've got time to open a ticket for each thing.

Thanks

[Tom Crowley]

Oh, this fixed itself...

[Bob Sovers]

The Atlassian webinar last week was 50% sales pitch for the new premium offering, and no real explanation of when the broken features would be fixed.

[jim mason]

We need a commitment from the product team to ensure the full functionality of the old editor is preserved in all supported environments as a priority. A simple statement to make for the product team.

[Huw Griffiths]

Hi Jim 

I'm one of the frustrated users who got to have a call with Avinoam directly a few weeks ago. I also coach folks in strategy, innovation and disruption. I am a "content-rich" user with 98% of my collaborators / users using monitors, not mobile. 

From my perspective, the Confluence Cloud team are taking a deliberate approach to turn off the old editor and move to a new simpler editor. They just have not been open in saying that yet as it means that this is not just a product upgrade, but essentially a move to a different type of product. 

If you have read the now 20+ year old work on disruptive innovation by Clayton Christensen, they seem to be responding to a classic disruption playbook risk here. The classic case study on disruptive risk is when your low end / simple users or non-customers (people who might use your product if it were simpler / cheaper) are attracted to a new simpler offering / competitor (such as nuclino). That new entrant then grows over time, adding more features etc,  which eventually enables them to steal your core customer base from below. 

The warning message in Christensen's original work was that if you listen to your best customers (i.e those of us on this forum) and do not cater to your simple / low end users or current "non-customers, you risk eventually being disrupted, That's why Christensen called his book the innovators dilemma.  - it is not intuitive to ignore your best customers, but his message was that if you solely focus your product's value proposition & future road map on the needs of your best customers, you risk disruption from this classic disruption playbook. 

The issue for us all in this forum is that the Confluence Cloud team seemed to have taken this sort of advice, and the subsequent misguided conclusions that followed it such as "you should disrupt yourself before its too late" too literally.  That is why I believe they now have deaf ears to you, their best customers as they go about reducing the functionality of Confluence. 

They seemed to have missed subsequent thinking from Christensen and other approaches to managing the risk of disruption,  such as maintaining your core customers with the current product whist diversifying or versioning their product to defend the simple / low end / non-customer needs. Many of you have suggested this strategy  - keep the old editor as a different version from the new mobile friendly editor. Our issue is that I have seen very little sign that they are adopting that strategy. The old editor is still "(old) (going away soon)".

I also don't think they have factored in the key maven role that many of you on this forum play in getting their products (cloud and server) adopted in large organisations (read the Tipping Point - 3 agents of change - this is many of you folks...) The risk which they seem to have missed here is that in frustrating and ignoring you - their best customers, may lead to you leading their core customer base off to alternative solutions.

For my own business I'm testing out alternatives as my corporate customers are increasingly asking why I encourage them to spend $hundreds per month on Confluence Cloud for 100+ users when OneNote and Microsoft Teams are bundled in with their O365 and converging on the functionality of Confluence.  For me Confluence still has the edge on some value proposition factors such as user rights management, but in terms of content editing, that gap is closing. 

At the end of my call with Avinoam, who was good enough to listen to my concerns, I stated that from my perspective the product team was breaking an Atlassian core value. It's not the open company, no bullshit one - I read that as an internal facing value for how staff treat each other which does not need to extend to the customer, its this one:

Don’t #@!% the customer

Customers are our lifeblood. Without happy customers, we’re doomed. So considering the customer perspective - collectively, not just a handful - comes first.

And there it is at the end,  an acknowledgement of the risk of disruption if they only listen to a handful,  but with the release of this new editor, they have not figured out how not to  #@!% the handful of their most loyal customers!

In breaking this core value with the handful of experienced users, I pointed out that their approach to deploying this new editor was fundamentally breaking my trust in Atlassian. 

When it comes to trust, my final book reference is for Animal Farm. So many of the people commenting in this forum remind me of Boxer, the loyal hard working horse who ended up working himself into the ground because of the subtle change in strategy by the committee of pigs who ran the farm. Boxer and the other animals trusted the pigs to their cost, as they did not realize until too late that the pigs no longer had their best interests at heart. 

The people on this forum spend huge amount of time creating and maintaining content, and are now trying to make that work with the new editor, whilst hoping that the old editor will be reprieved.  I'm afraid that with this new editor it is a case of "Four columns good, two columns better". It looks like the old editor is going to be carted off in the knackers van. 

Why write all this? because I asked Avinoam and his team to be open and honest if there is no intent not to turn off the old editor or version the product as so many of you are asking for, but I have not seen any sign of that in the forums or official announcements since my call with them 2+ weeks ago. 

So here it is again, now a public request that Atlassian be open with the users about what the  product strategy is.  If the future is only the new editor, which will never be as feature rich as the old editor by design,  please just say so, so that those of who cannot work with the new editor can find alternatives and avoid working themselves into the ground trying to make the new editor work with our existing and future content. 

[Helen Gosper]

To continue the 'Animal Farm' theme ... sounds a bit like all Confluence customers are equal; it's just than some are more equal than others. And like poor old Boxer it's the customers who have been not only using Confluence for years, but evangelically extolling its virtues to colleague and purse-controllers, who find themselves off to the knackery. Until now I've resisted the urge to post a smart-Alec comment, preferring to remain professional and optimistic. But @Huw Griffiths  has hit a nerve. 

Right, now I've got that out of my system.  Back to 'professional' persona.

[James Dellow]

Actually, I think this is more about the product management and user experience culture that has come into Atlassian during the time the business has experienced huge growth recently. The sense I get is that in fact they are approaching Confluence Cloud and the editor changes like a startup or a consumer tool, rather than a mature enterprise product. They are leaning toward eliminating the exceptions (low usage features, features that generate support calls, features with high technical debt). Unfortunately enterprise is all about supporting the edge cases and exceptions. On the other hand I can see the vision for Cloud emerging and just like the shift from pure wiki markup to the current (not the new) editor, this does need to happen for Confluence to stay relevant to new and future users.

[Huw Griffiths]

Hi James - thanks -  useful perspectives.

I agree their is a need to stay relevant to new and future users, but the question is whether that needs to be at the expense of existing users. That is their dilemma, and by association, ours. 

There are a lot a range of alternative approaches to reducing that dilemma which I don't see them adopting. Instead we are being put through what seems to be, as you say, a start up approach to testing out a new editor with paying customers with the hope that we will stay with them on that journey. 

[Huw Griffiths]

And regarding your valid point on culture and approach to product changes, my point is that the start up culture has to a large degree been influenced over the last 10-15 years by strategic thinking and execution concepts such as disruptive innovation, lean start up, Agile, design thinking and design sprints etc.

Like a hammer, these are useful tools when used correctly, but if not, they can cause a lot of damage....

Right, as Helen said, I've got that out of my system. Back to wrangling words in the new editor for my client. 

[Helen Gosper]

Here's another thing I've only just noticed. On a 'legacy' page, it seems that sketch doesn't work. And while the 'old' image properties options are there, the old sketch of course isn't. 

So ... I want to spend about 30 seconds to click on an image (which s a screenshot), select sketch, add a white 20px highlight to blank out a number (showing data I don't want to be shown in an example) and save. This used to be literally (and I mean literally in the correct sense of the word) a 30 second job.

Any suggestions on equally quick options?

[JoAnna Black]

What are you using to take screenshots? I know the Windows snipping tool has a markup feature you can change to white. You can cover up info with it and then copy and paste.

[Helen Gosper]

Joanna, I currently use the Mac OS keyboard shortcuts, and up until now have relied on the ability to do these quick markups (eg, adding an arrow, blanking out something) in Confluence. But I am familiar with the windows snipping tool and can download something for Mac which will do the trick. Thanks for the tip - I was so hung up on not being able to do it in confluence any more that I've probably spent more time complaining about it than it would have taken me to download a fix.

[JoAnna Black]

I understand totally!! There are a lot of issues with these changes...hard to not feel frustrated :)

[Michael Corvin]

FYI, on macos, take screenshots easily with Preview:  File > Take Screenshot > {From Selection... , From Window..., From Entire Screen} then save in desired format

[Michael Howard]

Is there a way to embed an image from another page?

I'm trying to embed the Build Status from Jenkins (So Copy/Paste wont work) into a wiki article but the only way I can get it to work is using an iFrame, which doesn't work as I can't insert it into a cell in a table.  

[JoAnna Black]

I'm not sure if this will work in a table but a workaround others have found is to use the Excerpt macro. Hope that helps!

[Michael Corvin]

ooof, using Excerpt is so clunky for that - and won't work for multiple files/images attached to one page.

When I get the chance (might be a while...) I want to use my Python wiki access/creation tools (REST API)  to see if the macro parameters still can support the link reference - I suspect that the underlying functionality is still there, is just that the emasculated, Fisher-Price 'new experience' editor just doesn't expose it in the UI - at least I hope so!   Although, if they've radically changed the storage schema, they'll have broken my tools.

"What a CALAMITY!"

[JoAnna Black]

I didn't realize you can only have one excerpt per page....that's really unfortunate. I really don't understand the logic behind not being able to use images from other pages. This is a basic concept in web design. Having to manually change a picture across pages is laborious.

Atlassian claims attaching content across pages leads to "unexpected results" but it seems like the folks lacking understanding of this concept would never run into this issue in the first place. Seems like they wouldn't referencing files attached to other pages if they aren't trying to create dynamic content across pages.

[Davin Studer]

I don't think the underlying storage format has changed. You can still see it in the page "..." menu.

[Michael Corvin]

yes, i've looked at that and am 'hopeful'...

Totally agree, @JoAnna Black , being able to use images and files (eg pptx, with viewer set to show a particular slide #...) from another page is fundamental - we use it in many places.

[Bob Sovers]

From reading the comments on https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/What-just-happened-to-Confluence-Cloud/td-p/622890 

It is apparent that this is not the first time that Atlassian has made drastic changes without informing their user base.

[Dean Bigbee]

Personally, me and my org love the new editing experience. I'm simply waiting for the old one to be gone, and for ALL pages to be brought into the new, especially Templates, as that's the biggest cause of pain right now that some pages are styled one way, and others an other, and some don't have option to be the new experience.

Great work, please standardize soon! <3 

[Ricardo Clements]

Curious, what is it about the new experience that warms your heart vs the previous experience?

My experience has been content creators relish in the ability to adapt presentation with many different layout/formatting options/controls so they can suit the content/presentation to their intended audience.

Do you have different parts of the organization wanting flexibility to present their content in a manner of their choosing or do all parts of the org require homogenization of the presentation of their content?

[Dean Bigbee]

I love the ability to have documentation that is more than wall of text ugliness, which I find becomes a barrier for other departments to quickly understand the theme of the project and the most important data for them.

We require some homogenization, as in each space has key information in the same spot that is easy to glean for anyone visiting that space, no matter if they haven't been there before. The greater visual options help to keep information popped to the eye where it needs to be.

Finally, I personally believe that clean, well branded documentation internally helps in propagating clean, well branded documentation externally. 

Or, TL;DR - Confluence is now a space that everyone in our organization who's not a software developer or accountant can look at and understand at a glance, once space templates are able to have the new editing experience. 

[Tom Crowley]

@Dean Bigbee You can request your site to be moved over completely to the new editor. Some pages can't be converted, for example if you have any admonition macros in lists, and tables with images in prevent it somehow too. I'm not sure what the long-term plan is for forcing incompatible pages to the new editor, though. 

[jim mason]

Hopefully Atlassian will allow pages with the old editor to continue to work fully in all spaces without exception. The new editor is not an option for our company

[Erickson Baniaga]

How do I opt out of this for my new pages?  The formatting options are terrible.  You can't even do a simple outline with checkboxes! 

[Tom Crowley]

Can we just go back to the removal of inline images? 

Now when I export to HTML for inclusion elsewhere, all the icons and buttons I spent ages uploading as emoji don't export as emoji. Maybe I should have realised this before doing it, maybe.

Or maybe we should just have carried on using inline images...

Thoughts? Workarounds? Apologies...?

[Tom Crowley]

Also, if anyone fancies a giggle, from Atlassian's "Values" page:

 

https://www.atlassian.com/company/values

[Bob Sovers]

That must be an "Alternative Fact"

[Maurice Pasman]

Well, the loophole is right there.

Apparently, we are not a collective, yet a mere handful :-(.

[Bob Sovers]

Sooooo... unless ALL of Atlassian's customers collectively complain about something, then the handful of complaining CUSTOMERS will just be ignored!

[jim mason]

maybe there was an expiration date on the values page ??  Was it written in Confluence Cloud using the new editor??

[Tom Crowley]

Maybe it was written in the old editor and only still applies to certain customers. Maybe the rest of us got the new values with the useful features stripped out.

[kdoudkin@sciaps.com]

Hello, I've just got an updated version and struggle a lot with inserting images. It used to work so well, and now I feel the experience is completely broken. Unless some features became hidden. Please help:

Looks like I can no longer insert images side by side on the same line. For example take a screenshot, paste it to the page, take another - paste it next to it - no longer works. I have to use PDF doc to do the layout of all images I need and take a screenshot of a pfd doc. I'm on Mac/Chrome Browser.

I couldn't figure out how to apply a custom size for an image (resize). It allows me only few predefined scales. That field (option) was available before - just click on a image and specify its size in px.

Also the original zoom scale of a copied/pasted image is closer to 400% and I wonder why? Was always 100%.

The new experience allows only Left, right and center alignment for images. I can't insert images anywhere I want on the page unfortunately. Used to work in the prev version (by adding spaces I could move an image along the line.

Thank you in advance!

[Tom Crowley]

Try the `/layouts` macro? You can't use it inside an ordered/unordered list or inline with text, but if you just need two or three images on one line on their own, it might be a feasible workaround.

Possibly.

[Kory Lamme]

I'm really sad with the new editor, you've taken so much from what I can do to make a beautiful article. It's like you've decided instead of giving us the ability to create our OWN writing, design, and formatting styles, you are forcing us to follow YOURS.

-No more customized panels

-Can't use sections / column inside of pre-built panels

-CAN'T EVEN INDENT TEXT?!?! WHAT?!!!! I remember learning how to intend text in elementary school, with pencil and paper.

-Who even cares about "live gadgets" if they write Confluence pages every day, I already know what they all look like.

I'm extremely dissatisfied. I'm in the middle of building a major project and you're cutting off my ability to create content the way I that I want to, and the way I decided to when I first started said project. This is your pretty typical "looks great on the surface" crap that was designed by marketing and sales, with no thought in mind for the end-user. But who cares since it looks so great, right?

[Dieter Wall]

Hi,

I haven't found any informations about migration of "old" articles. Some of our users creating new articles with the new editor (since previous "blank page" will be removed automatically?!) and say they keep the default layout (centered with lots of margin left and right).

What happens with our existing articles? Will we have to live with different layouts and editors? any chance to auto upgrade articles or complete stop the new editor?

[Tom Crowley]

Hi Dieter,

They will convert your instance of Confluence to only use the new editor if you raise a ticket/ask them to.

However, there are one or two things to be aware of:

• Any inline images in page that are converted from one to the other might break.
• Any page that has other elements unique to the old editor will not be converted.
  For me this was admonition (warning) panels in lists and something related to image and tables.
• Any page that doesn't meet the criteria for conversion will remain on the old editor until you remove any offending elements, at which point it will be converted when you publish it.

You can also configure the templates available to users. It might help to remove or disable any offending templates, or replace them with ones based in the new editor.

I have asked what will happen to incompatible old pages when they discontinue the old editor, but - as with many questions posed to Atlassian about the editor - they have gone ignored.

Good luck...!

[Dieter Wall]

Hi Tom,

thanks for reply and the informations but the options sounds really bad -.-' 
Do you know if there is a chance of a test migration or is it only a one way option? Any option to manually try it for specific articles? (without copy n paste :D) 

My other problem is that I cannot found any settings regarding to new editor. Are there any settings available?
For example I would like to have always 100% and the user should not have the possibility to change it or so.

[Tom Crowley]

Hmm, I'm not sure. I thought I'd edited my reply to say that I'm not sure inline images break now, I think they just don't convert, so you have to go through and delete them first. I'd guess it's a one-way option, and once done I'm not sure they'd convert you back.

I've not seen any config for the new editor. Do you mean to use the editor 100% of the time? I think that's only possible by migrating everything to the new editor. Only when your instance has switched over to the new editor and there are no pages left on the old editor can you be sure no one will create new old pages. Then maybe still make sure there are no old-style templates left as options.

I think, anyway. Raise a ticket and maybe talk through it with the support person?

The options aren't great, you're right.

[Dieter Wall]

Thanks a lot Tom :-) I will contact the support

[Bob Sovers]

The only user configuration options associated with the Confluence Cloud editor are:

• Disable Autocomplete -- Disable Autocomplete in the Editor, where it allows links to be inserted with the trigger [, images with the trigger ! and user mentions with the trigger @.
• Disable Autoformatting -- Disable Autoformatting in the Editor, where it allows wiki-formatted text to be converted to its Rich Text equivalent (e.g. "h1. title" for a heading).
• Enable full-width as the default for new pages.

This can be reached by a left-click on your avatar/initials in the lower left (Confluence Screen) then selecting "Settings"

[Bob Sovers]

As of 2019-10-04, Atlassian has updated their roadmap for the editor -- https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html

However, it shows a lot of the things that are being bit%$^#$%^ed about as [NO PLAN] -- I'm not sure if this is helpful or discouraging.  What is more infuriating is the sparseness of the "Track the backlog" column.  For a select few items, it has an associated Jira task,  The majority of the short-term and long-term backlog items have no linked Jira task, so there is no way to actually see any progress on these issues.

[Tom Crowley]

I had a look down the roadmap, and in the name of "improvements", I counted 16 features (excluding the keyboard shortcuts) that existed in the old editor but not in the new editor, and only 5 that existed in the new editor but not in the old editor.

There's nothing on there about editing images (if you can count putting a plain solid black border around an image 'editing' it, which is all I want to do).

I'm sure Jira tickets have been created for some of the ones that aren't tracked, too, which isn't particularly reassuring. It is fairly consistent with the poor communications throughout this process, though.

(I seem to get a lot of 'session expired' errors when trying to comment on this page. I'd like to believe that's not an attempt at censorship... :D )

[Bob Sovers]

Beware... other users are making new comments to comments from 8 or 9 months back.  I got curious when I received a watch email with the message  "We'll add that right away. It's actually in the works so we'll be sure to let the community know once it's live." --- since this is very rarely heard from Atlassian. 

I had to re-read the comment stream from the beginning to find what was being discussed, back on page 2 of the comments.  --- the "feature" that is "in the works" is about indented tasks  -- CONFCLOUD-65755 

[Bob Sovers]

Since Atlassian can't see, to find the associated JIRA tasks for items in the roadmap...

Alt text -- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-23547 --- But appears to be CLOSED

Background color -- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-64708 

Copy paste / move layouts -- counld be: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67648

Drag and drop columns and rows of tables -- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-25847

Image is a link -- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-58925

Link to a placeholder -- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67129 

Media annotations -- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-2584

[Kory Lamme]

Thanks Bob, this is good to know

[Tom Crowley]

Will the new editor get helpful error messages in time?

A document I imported from Word came in to the old editor. It needed splitting, so I pasted half of it into the new editor (my default editor). I now can't publish the page and don't know why.

[Bob Sovers]

(Sarcasm ON..)   well Obviously there was some error processing this request.  It could be your browser, your font choice, your choice of sourcing the document from a Microsoft product, your place on the globe, your shoe size, your political affiliation, your belief that Atlassian wants to help their paying customers, or any of a myriad or totally uncontrollable issues.  (sarcasm off...)   

Good luck...  Can you copy just the text content and try to reformat it in Confluence once you get the words in?

[Tom Crowley]

I had to copy the text across from the original Word document in the end I think. Not sure what the hiccup was, but it didn't like something. We also found that you can't easily copy and paste tables from the old editor to the new editor...

[Patrick Gregory]

One of our dev team members just ran a performance test on one of our Confluence pages with 6 bullet points and a hyperlink and it was a 16MB. WTF.

[Michael Corvin]

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGG

Yet another item of LOST FUNCTIONALITY with the crapulent new editor to totally aggravate us.

Creating a 'blind' link to an uncreated page no longer will create that page when it is clicked.  It just fails as a link with a page not found.

And, when I create a page with the title exactly matching the blind link, the *(^&%*&)((_ thing doesn't find it.

This was very useful to have when outlining a tree of content.

I also just noticed that the inserted link has a stupid icon and shadow format which makes it totally clunky when inlined within a block of text.  WTF???

And whenever the page refreshes, the whole URL is momentarily shown before the link is shown in the dumbass new format.

Atlassian, if you are reading this, you guys are totally cluster-fracking this.  If you put this shyte into the server version we will be done.  We can't afford our spaceflight mission-critical areas to be so massively disrupted by such an ill-considered upheaval and unconscionable loss of basic functionality.

As it is, our current use of the one Cloud site is not as intensive and critical, but if you don't fix things and restore lost functionality I'll seriously consider deprecating it.

[Cameron Mathers]

Well said. I personally didn't want to be that blunt even though I feel exactly the same.

[Bob Sovers]

This: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65634 

is the Jira bug on this "improvement"    Please vote for it or comment there so that Atlassian can "Gather Impact" of this known BUG! 

Getting Atlassian to admit that their feature "changes" are actually bugs is very difficult, but even after they admit that something is a bug, they still wait for some level of concern (apparently signalled by the votes and/or comments) before they actually work to FIX it.

[Cameron Mathers]

This new UI experience is awful.

If you are not going to allow us to continue using the older editor can you please advise how I do the following:

"Type [ and enter part of the page name then select the page from the list. (You can hover over each suggestion to see which space the page is from)."

As documented under "Internal Links" on:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/insert-links-and-anchors-724764900.html

[Kyle]

The new link shortcut is Ctrl+K instead of [. Hit Ctrl+K and then start typing the name of a page and pick from the list. It shows the full page name and the space that each page is in. This works well.

Don't know if it will work for anchors on a page. But for links to a page it is easy and quick.

[JoAnna Black]

@Kyle Last I saw the anchor macro doesn't work in the new editor. Do you know if it's working now?

[Kyle]

@JoAnna Black  No the anchor macro described is not working in our confluence cloud instance yet. No way to copy the anchor by hovering over the header as they indicated it will work.

Ctrl+K link macro works for page links right now but not anchors on pages.

[Cameron LaBorde-Zank]

@JoAnna Black  @Kyle you can anchor to headings in pages. Its for some reason case sensitive so be aware of that. This is not a fix for the lack of real anchors, but it is a temporary and rather poor workaround. 

from the documentation:

Anchors are automatically generated for each page header.
To link to one, use the https://pageURL#headingtext. The anchor text must be formatted as it is on the page, including punctuation marks, but without spaces.

For example, to link to this section, we would add #Anchors to the page URL, like so: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ConfCloud/Confluence+Cloud+Editor+Roa

[Tom Crowley]

They keep promising that we'll be able to link to headers soon, but the functionality is yet to actually materialise.

[Cameron LaBorde-Zank]

@Tom Crowley I can do it right now? Like it works, it works poorly for a lot of reasons but if you make a link to the parent page with #HEADERNAME it will work. The #header link has to match the exact case of the header which it doesn't state anywhere in the documentation for this "feature."

But yeah, dunk on Atlassian all day because this entire confluence cloud roll-out has been comically awful but the header thing does function in its extremely limited bad way. If you cant do it on your own instance its likely because of their terrible selective slow deployment process. I've been able to link to headers for a while now, but other functionality they say exists doesn't exist on my instance. This is part of the bigger problem: the product is not the product despite the whole point of cloud being that you're up to date and maintained. 

[Tom Crowley]

Yeah, that works, ish. We've not had much luck with it, and it's a horribly clunky way of doing it, but Atlassian keeps banging on about being able to copy the link to a header but it's not available yet. By now, you should - according to them - be able to point to a heading to display a copy link icon.

As you say, it's just one poorly executed action in a whole bucket of other poorly executed actions...

[Helen Griffith]

Ctrl+K or any other way of inserting a link is fine unless you have a lot of pages. The link editor can ONLY find pages viewed 'recently'. I want to be able to search for ALL my pages (in a very big space).

[Bob Sovers]

In the road map (https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html)

The feature described as "Anchor macro" shows "Links to headings are natively available - no macro needed!"  and a link to the Jira task: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-66773 that has a resolution as "Deployed"

So I guess that this is all that we are going to get.

[Cameron LaBorde-Zank]

hmm, yup, this is some dog shit.

[James Gill]

Open a bug report and classify it as a serious/mission critical bug.  I don't know about you, but if I have the ability to only create links using pages I've recently visited I will be moving away from Confluence Cloud entirely.

What previously was a work flow of, "Type [ and enter part of the page name then select the page from the list. (You can hover over each suggestion to see which space the page is from)."

Is now, "Type / and search for a page only to realize that the page is not appearing, navigate to another tab, open a new page in confluence, using the default search tool find the page that I know exists, click the link, close the tab, save the changes to the page that I was originally on (which apparently causes all kinds of issues if multiple people are editing a page), reload the page, re-type / and hope that the page is updated, and then create the link".

Whoever the PM is for this particular feature should be fired.

[James Gill]

Turns out that Confluence Devs have known about this particular BUG (Hint: It's a Core Feature of Confluence) and currently have it listed as Low Priority.  CONFCLOUD-67714 

You know what to do.

[Tom Crowley]

Can I just say how much I like this conversation here. It makes me feel like part of a small and very angry family.

[jim mason]

I take exception to the term "small" - LOL

[Bob Sovers]

I just get very frustrated that this is now on PAGE 7 of the comments, and while it has given us all a place to vent our frustrations, it doesn't appear to be making a difference.  We used to get actual responses from Atlassian, but seem to be getting fewer and fewer of those.

[Bob Sovers]

I just saw this --  https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-discussions/Join-me-Pratima-Arora-Atlassian-s-Head-of-Product-for-Confluence/td-p/1199266

Maybe they do want our feedback....   (note, I'm not holding my breath, just being the eternal optimist.)

The last Webinar just ended up as a sales call trying to sell us on the new Premium service.

[Tom Crowley]

I actually just started Page 8... Although that was with a link to the Ask Me Anything scheduled for tomorrow with the head of Confluence. She wants to hear about our experiences with the new editor/Confluence improvements and about the roadmap.

I think it will be interesting to see which questions they answer there.

I still stand by my observation that Avinoam only responds to the easy/nice comments on here, although he's been even less active at that recently. I do wonder whether they are hiding away from it all. Or even whether the AMA tomorrow is the start of a bit of an internal shake-up.

[Tom Crowley]

@Bob Sovers That's the one. Similar to the previous one, it seems to have been done with a very low-key, minimal publicity campaign. 

[Bob Sovers]

I only find stuff when I go searching thru the Confluence Community site.  I'm not sure that they try to actively inform anyone.  Though I did get a very long series of response emails when I filed a bug report or reported an issue.  NOTE:  The follow up emails were just contacting me, not actually resolving anything, or even really trying to answer the questions.

[Michael Corvin]

... @Tom Crowley : or we're just the bunch of raving crazy aunts and uncles that they like to keep locked up here in the community attic, away from all the more compliant members of the family!

[James Dellow]

Is it just me, but didn't the Attachments Macro allow you to upload multiple files at the same time? Now it looks like you need to drag anywhere on the page but onto the macro's upload zone. (The picker doesn't work either.) 

I mean, it does say "files":

[Tom Crowley]

@Bob Sovers I get that. They were vaguely helpful once, but now whenever I submit something it feels like nothing happens for a few weeks and then I get an email asking me how well they did now it's closed.