Why are deleted Inline comments showing up in the Confluence Mobile version?

[Dean Lappi]

Hello,

Background:

My company has a public developer documentation Confluence wiki. I completely rewrote and restructured it in 2017, and to do this (we don't have the Scroll add-ons) we made a copy of it on our internal wiki where we used Inline Comments to collaboratively work on it with the entire team while keeping the existing live wiki untouched.

When the new documentation wiki was complete, I deleted all of the inline comments (we don't want the public seeing them), and then deleted the existing live version and made the new version live (I know, labor intensive).

PROBLEM:

The desktop view of the new developer documentation Wiki is clean and does not show any inline comments. But, when I enabled the Mobile version, all of the in-line comments became visible again when viewing the Mobile version (the desktop version remained clean). They are internal review comments and not meant for the public, so I disabled the mobile version until I can figure out why.

Have you seen this before? If so, is there a solution to remove the inline comments from the Mobile view of the wiki?

Thank you for your time.

Kind regards,

Dean

[AnnWorley · Accepted solution]

Hi Dean,

My testing experience was that immediately after deleting the inline comments they were still visible in mobile view but as soon as I refreshed the comments were gone. In your case, I understand the comments were deleted before the page was made public so I am surprised the comments ever appeared on the public version.

I was not able to find a bug report for the behavior you are seeing.

I tested on Confluence 6.6. Please let me know your version so I can try to reproduce the issue on your version of Confluence.

Thanks,

Ann

[Dean Lappi]

Hi Ann,

Thank you very much for your quick response!

I am using Confluence 6.2.3.

I tested it again just now. Here is what I did:

1. I Enabled the Confluence Mobile Plugin.
2. I opened the documentation wiki on a Mobile device.
3. I opened a page and at the bottom were the inline comments. I then switched to Desktop View on the same page and the inline comments were NOT visible.
4. I disabled the Confluence Mobile Plugin again.

It seems to be an issue with the Confluence Mobile Plugin somehow picking up the deleted inline comments code.

Thank you, again, Ann. I appreciate your help in testing this.

Kindest regards,

Dean

[AnnWorley]

Hi Dean,

My pleasure, it's an interesting case.

I took the steps you described on my Confluence 6.2.3 test instance and I was not able to see the deleted comments in mobile view. So now I am starting to cast about for solutions.

I did find that resolved comments persisted in mobile view. It  happened on my instance and then I found this bug report that describes the same behavior you are reporting, but with resolved comments. Hide Resolved comments in Mobile View

Are you sure the comments were deleted and not resolved?

All the best,

Ann

[Dean Lappi]

Hi Ann,

I don't remember for sure, but I could very well have resolved the comments instead of deleting them. 

The behavior described in the Jira bug report you shared is exactly what I am experiencing.

Do you know if this bug was fixed in newer versions after 6.2.3?

Thanks again!

Dean

[AnnWorley]

Since the bug is still open, I had my doubts but I tested on Confluence 6.6 and the resolved comments still show in the mobile view. :(

I think it's unfortunate that the resolve button is easy to click on but you have to access a pull down to find the delete option:

Please try the steps again on a test page, making sure to delete an inline comment and then see if it still shows in mobile. 

Thanks for helping us narrow down this issue.

Cheers,
Ann

[Dean Lappi]

Thank you, Ann.

I will look into this test tomorrow and let you know the results.

Wishing you a fantastic afternoon.

Kind regards,

Dean

[AnnWorley]

Sounds good! I will watch for your update. :)

[Dean Lappi]

Hi Ann,

I ran a test to add an inline comment and then delete it.

The delete functionality works and the inline comment does not continue showing in a Mobile view.

So it is definitely the Resolve inline comment functionality that keeps the inline comment showing in the Mobile view.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Kind regards,

Dean

[AnnWorley]

Thanks for following up to settle the thread. :)

Glad the deleted comments are gone now from mobile view!

[Christopher Taverna]

Ann, is there a way to find comments to delete? I have a resolved inline comment that is showing on mobile, but I don't have any way to bring the comment up to delete it. The comment is attached to text that was deleted from the page. Thank you!

[AnnWorley]

Hi Christopher,

I reproduced the behavior on my test instance and found that it is just as you are reporting. If the text is deleted you can pull up the resolved comment but you  cannot delete the comment. Turns out we have an open issue for it: Deleted text that contained a resolved inline comment cannot be re-opened to delete

Please vote or comment on the ticket to emphasize your use case to the development team.

There is a workaround on the suggestion ticket that involves restoring an old version of the page but it seems tedious.

Thanks,
Ann

[Christopher Taverna]

Thank you!