Comments marked resolved due to text deletion but not actually deleted

[Brenda Hoyle]

Hi all,

I keep having an issue with Confluence where when the page gets published, Confluence will mark some comments as "resolved" and note the reason for it as someone from our team deleted the text. The problem is... no one is deleting or copy and pasting the text. It even listed me as someone who deleted text, but all I did was add text.

To add to the issue, because Confluence thinks the text was deleted, it won't let me reopen the comment thread.

Is anyone else having this issue and, if so, are there any known fixes for this?

[Brooke Ashley]

@Diego Any updates on this? We are running into the same exact issue

[Caitlin Main]

I just had this exact situation happen to me yesterday, including being unable to reopen the resolved comment in question. I was doing a review of all comments in a longer confluence doc, and was saving after each edit/resolution. I was the only one editing the page at that time, and found that the resolved comment was on text I had not touched at all during my edits. 

I have not seen it happen in any other pages so far, but I've informed my teams to keep an eye on their comments. I'm using Chrome (v86), as well. 

[Brenda Hoyle]

Thanks for sharing! It makes me feel a little better that it's not just unique to us. Hopefully this is something they'll resolve soon as it's causing issues in our document development process.

We've been using action items to cope with this bug where we can, but that's not always possible.

[adrianne]

It could be Grammarly or other browser extensions. Apparently if you are on a page, in edit mode, and you click the Grammarly button, it can close comments when  you save the page. It can also happen with other browser extensions, but I'm not sure which ones. Hope this helps. We are waiting to see if it happens again, now that we are aware of the Grammarly issue.

[LAL]

Seems like this is an regression issue. Issues linked have been resolved last year, but we are now experiencing this exact issue.

[Laura Kolker _Appfire_]

Just ran into this problem.

Page is a  massive table.

Using Firefox.

The row I added to had similar cell content to the rows with comments that were deleted. Maybe that's relevant. 

So last cell in 3 rows spread throughout the table had the same text ABC. Two had comments highlighting that text. I added some text to the 3rd row that started with the same text, and saved. The comments are now listed as deleted.

Reverting the page didn't help.

Correction: Reverting the page didn't change the state of the resolved comments, but it did allow me to reopen the comments.

[Sophie Clary]

Hello,

I just had the exact same issue and was quite distressed about it. I started commenting a very long page and had a total of 26 comments. 

When I came back to it 3h later and edited a part of that same page (I was the only person editing that page) which had no comment and published my modifications, 22 of my comments disappeared completely. Only when I closed Confluence completely and opened it again did the comments appear, but as resolved "because the text was deleted". 

Fact is, I did not delete that text...

I had to to go back to the previous version in order to have the option to reopen the comments. 

[Anders Qvist]

This issue remains. I suspect it is related to editing a page and then closing it without saving the changes. There is nothing in page history to indicate that the purportedly deleted text was touched. Since the comments cannot be reopened, this is a quite serious bug.

[Roman Lemtugov]

+1

After new version page publishing all new text gone (no delete action from my side), all comments was marked as deleted with incorrect timestamp (system show that I have deleted text 5-6 hours ago, actually no)

All changes haven't been saved and cannot be restored by previous version.

Page included:
- images
- tables
- text
- jira issue macros
- devider
- expand

WTF?!

[Mohammadmahdi Golmohammadi]

hi, same problem here. but we didnt have this problem before.
could you solve it?

[Diego]

Hello @Brenda Hoyle !

As I understand, inline comments are being marked as resolved due to the fact that Confluence interprets text as being removed from the page. This also causes the comments to get stuck in the resolved status because the original text was supposedly removed.

I tried to replicate this but was able to reach the same results only when actually removing all the original text from the page at once.

I have created this page with highlighted text (either with bold or the comment highlight) describing what I did to each specific piece of text that contained a comment:

Removing all commented text excerpt at once and then adding the exact same text back does not bring the comment back because we essentially deleted the original text and then added new text that is written as the original, but is not the original.

With this in mind, I would like to ask you a few questions. Here we go:

1. Could you describe in a step by step manner, how was this behavior triggered on your side?
2. Is this affecting all pages containing inline comments that you edit?
3. Is this happening regardless of the browser you use while editing the page?

Let us hear from you!

[Brenda Hoyle]

Hi Diego, 

Thanks for looking into this!

1. I've noticed the problem happens in the longer documents we work on when there's multiple people in the document at the same time, making edits in different sections. 
2. I have not noticed this happening in the smaller pages we have.
3. I use Google Chrome. 

For context, we're working on gov't papers, so the document ends up being quite long. Different people on our team are assigned different sections so at no point are they editing my sections. However, when my teammates make additions to their sections and publish the page, I'll get an email stating that they deleted and readded my section (on top showing me they added text to their sections) even though I was adding to that section that entire time and nothing was deleted.

[Brenda Hoyle]

@Diego Any updates on this? It's been almost a month and a half since I first posted about this issue.

[Diego]

Hello @Brenda Hoyle!

Thank you very much for keeping this thread alive. I am sorry for not coming back earlier. I was able to find the following report:

• The option to Reopen Resolved inline comments has disappeared

Atlassian is currently working to solve this issue. The best course of action would be to keep an eye there to check when the issue is solved.

Also, there is this another report about copying and pasting content with inline comments:

• [Confluence Cloud] Cutting and pasting an inline comment in editor resolves the inline comment 

Let me hear from you!

[Brenda Hoyle]

@Diego Thanks for sharing these. However, these don't address the main issue which is that Confluence is assuming we are deleting or copy/pasting content in the first place. What can you tell me about how this is being addressed?

[Diego]

Hello there @Brenda Hoyle ! That is something I have been trying to replicate but am unable to. However, I found this report:

• Inline comments get resolved when you click on the Grammarly button in edit mode

Would it be possible for you to try and replicate the behavior when all your browsers addons are disabled (if any) or using another browser?

Let us hear from you.

[Rebecca Sullivan]

Is there any resolution to this? We have just encountered this problem. Version comparison clearly indicates the text that presumably was deleted was never deleted. This is potentially devastating to our work.

In my particular instance, there were unconnected pieces of text with comments in which the comments were inappropriately resolved when the author published the page. 

• In Resolved Comments, these instances all say the comment was resolved by the text being deleted at 8:06pm yesterday. These comments were in different locations within the document.
• In Version History, there is no indication that any of these text fragments were deleted.

This is the troubleshooting I performed:

• I tested whether cutting and pasting the same text in the same location would show up in version comparison, and in fact the comparison does NOT indicate cut and paste occurred. HOWEVER--
• When I cut and pasted the same text with an inline comment in the same location, the inline comment remained.

I am completely flummoxed. @Diego is there any new information on this issue?

[Brenda Hoyle]

@Rebecca Sullivan No resolution to this. We have experienced it again this month as well. @Diego was never able to replicate it. The only things I noticed when it happened was that it occurred in long documents. I previously thought this happened when there were multiple people editing documents at the same time, but this happened to me while I was the only person editing the document last week.

[Rebecca Sullivan]

@Brenda Hoyle how maddening! This is a serious problem for us. 

Can I ask what browser you are using? My user with the problem was using Firefox v. 86 on MacOS. 

becky

[Brenda Hoyle]

@Rebecca Sullivan We're all using Chrome on Windows PCs and Mac OS.

[Rebecca Sullivan]

@Brenda Hoyle @Caitlin Main  are you all using the Cloud version of Confluence by any chance?

[Brenda Hoyle]

Yes we are 

[Caitlin Main]

We are as well

[Rebecca Sullivan]

ME TOO. I'm wondering if this is the source of the issue.

[Diego]

Hello there again. Thank you all for keeping this discussion going.

I am still trying to replicate this behavior. I got some colleagues to go and edit a page with me but the results where the same. No issue at all.

I am here once more to gather more information with you all, so here we go:

1. How many words are there in your document?
   You can use a word counter for that. Text editors such as Microsoft Word have it.
2. What kind of macros (if any) are present on the affected pages? Could you name them?
3. If you copy the affected pages, is the issue present in the copied pages as well?

This behavior seems to be hard to replicate and it seems that it happens at random. As you have specified, the page history version tells us that the related text was not edited, which makes this even weirder.

As I sent here before, there are bugs where comments are removed. But according to the description here, none of those fit the bill. So I am still looking for a way to reliably replicate this to move forward. Even if I raise a new report, I need to validate it so it is not closed as non-replicable.

Let us hear from you.

[Yulia Petrova]

Hello, I have lately encountered the problem several times. In all cases, a comment disappeared after editing a completely unrelated part of the page.

The last example:
1. My colleague added an inline comment to my page, which contains nearly 30 words, including a status macro and a list with two bullets and two cross-references.
2. I edited the page to change its status at the start of the page (before the list!). The only changed thing is the status macro.
3. I've noticed that the comment marked as resolved and disappeared, although the text related to this is unchanged.

I use Cloud Confluence + Safari browser (Version 14.0.3).

[Brenda Hoyle]

@Diego, here are the answers you asked for:

1. How many words are there in your document?
   You can use a word counter for that. Text editors such as Microsoft Word have it.
   • I checked one of the documents I had this issue on and it has 7,735 words
2. What kind of macros (if any) are present on the affected pages? Could you name them?
   • Table of contents
   • Actions
   • Tables
   • Panels
   • Not a macro, but there are also multiple images.
3. If you copy the affected pages, is the issue present in the copied pages as well?
   • As far as I can tell, the issue happens on larger documents regardless of if it was copied or not. It seems to be related to size. As an example, we recently copied a document that had 8,025 words and trimmed down the copy to 7,054 (with most of the words coming from tables vs. paragraphs of text) and I've not had this issue in that page yet. However, the issue did occur in the original page and I've had it continue to occur even in copies of other pages. Usually, when we copy pages, the amount of text in the page increases and the issue persists.

Hope this provides some useful information.

[Roman Zavalov]

Hi there, same problem here. All fresh comments became resolved with the reason "because the text was deleted" after I only changed the title of the page. 

Document is made up of 867 words in Russian and doesn't contain any macro. All the resolved comments were created in 3 hours prior to the title edit action. Comment from the last week left untouched.

[Joost Klessens]

I am having the same problem in multiple pages of a document we are creating using Confluence. The pages are fairly big, but mostly due to lots of images, The amount of words of the last page this happened on was about a 1000 words. There are about 20 images in the page, but over 40 in the attachments due to different versions.

As mentioned it has happened to me on multiple pages of this Confluence document, with different kind of changes (changed an image, changed one word, etc..). And when I view the history of the pages the changes shown are just that particular word or image. But publishing the change resolves ALL comments on that page, except the ones that are in images.

Aside from it happening in mutliple pages, I cannot replicate it at will. If I make a new page, everything seems to work fine.

This really is a breaking change for using Confluence for documentation in a team envorinment, as it has come to the point where I cannot edit any pages, until I am sure I resolved all comments on the page.

p.s. I am using Microsoft Edge, and "Enterprise Wiki is now running on Confluence 7.4.11"

edit: p.p.s. I just did the same change, as the last one that went wrong, using chrome and now it went ok and no comments appear to have been resolved. As extra info, my Edge is actually faitly bareboned and only has 2 extensions installed (uBlock origin, and Windows 10 Accounts), while my Chrome has lots of extensions (also including uBlock origin, and Windows 10 Accounts).

edit 2: p.p.p.s. In another page updating, without resolving comments, only works using Edge and not Chrome. So it is just getting more and more annoying and strange. Please get this fixed!

[Chris Bright]

Is there any update on this?  I am having the same problem (i.e. comments on large documents being "resolved because the text was deleted by <>" without any interaction  with the actual text taking place.

Are we saying that an edit anywhere on the page can impact comments elsewhere on it?

[adrianne]

Hello - Trying to get this thread going again. We are having the same issue. Inline comments are showing as resolved due to text being deleted, although the text is still there.

- It is on a longer document

- Chrome

- Cloud

This is really frustrating. Anyone out there have a solution?

[Sivan Tal]

Same here. We're also suffering from this bug.

[Matthias Möller]

We encountered that aswell. 

[adrianne]

I opened a ticket with Atlassian and will see what they say.

[Ben Dromey]

Also experiencing this. Lots of comments left on a table, after editing the table, all the comments are gone and says they are Resolved - Deleted. Very frustrating to now have to go back to the original commenter and ask them to first of all, remember where they left the comments, and then to have to leave the comments again.