I'm sorry but Jira's new blockquote formatting is not good

[Everett]

A week or two ago the way blockquotes are displayed in Jira changed.

It used to be that the quoted text was simply indented, but now blockquotes have quotation marks force-added at the beginning and end of each block section.

Aside from being semantically incorrect — the quoted text by definition doesn't contain the quotation marks that are being added within the block — it is confusing to readers when using blockquotes to denote text that should be character-for-character accurate, such as production-ready copy.

I could see this feature being implemented with oversized, stylized quotation marks (kindly do a web image search for "pull quotes" to see examples), but ideally the blockquote should be visually unadorned, except for perhaps a simple vertical bar on the left that no one would mistake for semantic text.

Thank you for reading this and I'm interested in hearing your thoughts as well! Cheers.

[François Pichard]

Hi,

I agree, it's not good.

I use {quote} to create blocks with details to make my tickets more readable:

Now it's the opposite...

I don't understand why it was changed.

Thanks

[Everett]

François, thank you for letting me know that I'm not the only one affected by this. I hope the change can be reverted, or otherwise improved.

[Hugh Warrington]

I completely agree.

The new styling might be appropriate for typesetting a printed book where there is, say, a quote to illustrate a new chapter. But it is downright silly when you consider the kinds of things that are normally quoted in a software issue tracker: logs, snippets of other tickets, emails.

Adding the quotation marks makes no sense in most contexts and is visually distracting.

To make matters worse, the implementation has IMO been botched. The quotation marks are curiously missing from copy-pasted text even when the selection appears to includes them. Furthermore the opening quotation mark is immediately next to the first character in the quoted text, but the closing quotation mark sticks out on its own way below the end of the text. It's as if there's a whole extra newline added to the end of the quote. For any quote where a trailing newline is significant, the experience is now broken.

The previous styling was much better, and didn't need altering. Please bring it back.

[Rostislav Harazin]

Exactly.

In the Text Formatting Notation Help there it is still as it should be:

So isn't it a bug?

[Rostislav Harazin]

I've issued the request to the Atlassian Support. Will share a resolution.

[Everett]

That's great to hear, Rostislav — thank you!

[Rostislav Harazin]

There is already this reported and closed bug:

• JRACLOUD-74542 Quotes within comments does not work as expected - Old issue view

This bug has been resolved in the New Issue View and we encourage any affected users to switch to the new issue view

[François Pichard]

Thank you for reporting the bug.

Sadly since the new issue view text edition is still not finished and still lacks some formatting (like line break \\ for example), that's not really a solution for me.
But as a Product Manager myself I can understand the prioritization choices ;)