2019: All Wrap(ped) Up Like a Present

[Monique vdB]

Sorry, @jeremy , this link should work but just in case I'll repost it below:

Hi all – We understand that some of you were disappointed by the transition to the new editor. I want to assure you that we’ve heard this feedback and internalized it. It will help shape the way we prioritize future features on the roadmap, how we roll them out, and bring our customers along also in 2020!

2019 was full of highs and lows. Our team learned a ton from you in the process on where we did well and not so well. As a result, we’ve tried to increase transparency with AMAs, one-on-one meetings with our product teams, focus groups, and more frequent Community engagement.

At the same time, our team continues spending time on our feature rollout strategy with lead time for site admins to learn about changes and prepare for them as well as giving end-users tools that will help ease their transition. In November, we invited customers getting ready to receive the new editor to learn about the transition and ask questions. This outreach was inspired by feedback we received from this Community! We’re also committed to keeping the editor roadmap here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html updated so customers can see the status of new features, legacy functionality, and bugs.

Thank you for your passion and your dedication along the way.

[jeremy]

Thanks. The roadmap link mentions that customers will have the option of choosing which pages to convert to the new editor. From what people in the thread have said, they want to be able to make new pages that use the old editor as well. This seems like a technical possibility if the old editor is still in use. Why not support that option while your dev team works on feature parity?

[Ope Animashaun]

Cool Updates. Thanks.

[Kelvin Hill]

@Jessica Taylor Please, please, please can we have an update on the latest changes to the new editor (Fabric Editor) that have been applied since the most recent post here (Dec 20, 2019)?

After receiving a tip-off, I created a new page in a test site. Using the legacy-style macro browser (click + form the menu, then ... View more), I was able to create a new page that included the previously deprecated DIV macro that the community was advised would not be implemented in the new browser.

This is major news. Major. The implementation of that particular deprecated macro will be a dream come true for many serious content authors.

If you tell us you have pulled out all the stops to introduce this and some other deprecated macros into the new editor, I, for one, will love you forever.

I'm sure there are even some users whose accounts have been blocked who would welcome the opportunity to rejoin this community and express their delight.

Perhaps that can be your gift of good will to them at the start of a new year.

[Tom Crowley]

@Jessica Taylor I also noticed this today, but couldn't find anything official on it. Someone suggested it was happening in December, and they suspected it was just to facilitate the migration of pages here. 

Having only just been forgiven for a well-intentioned and successful-but-ill-received stunt in December, I'm reluctant to criticise too harshly, but come now. The editor has changed. I've spoken to various people who have noticed it, some on here and some through other networks, so I know it's not just a glitch on my instance. The only way these changes could happen is through a release of some description. 

Instead of this inappropriately self-congratulatory and woefully thoughtless post, why did we not get a "What's new" release note? 

@Kelvin Hill seems to think that you're looking to re-enable vital features you removed from us in spite of our protests. @Alberto Buriticá (via the link I included) suspects that you are just doing this to facilitate an upcoming migration.

We could sit and speculate on this all day, or you could explain the change to us.

You wonder why we continue to criticise the Product team, in direct contravention of the community rules, yet you promise clarity with your words but remove it with your actions. For reasons explained in earlier posts and comments, I am losing a rationale for being civil. If you won't respond to my professional and helpful comments, then it will become clear that you have no interest in my feedback, and so I will stop giving feedback, and will instead vent my frustrations and anger, whereupon I will get banned. We've seen it happen with other users, and no doubt it will happen again. You will eventually end up in the Emperor's New Clothes situation I outlined last year, although I assume you didn't read it, where people don't tell you the truth and your product suffers for it. 

Why can we see the old macros? Does this mean we can start using them again? Or are they just there to help transition old pages across? If the latter, why? If they work in the new editor, and they appear to, let us have them! 

[Sharon Helms]

I'm also seeing old macros, such as the legacy Panel macro, and would like to know why.

Should we be telling our users to avoid using them, or can we keep them?

Thanks in advance for providing us with an update, so we can plan and train our users accordingly.

[Maurice Pasman]

@Tom Crowley I for one applaud your honesty and the ways in which you seem to capture what most of us are thinking. 👏

[Tom Crowley]

@Maurice Pasman Thanks, I appreciate that.

[Kelvin Hill]

I have just posted this message to another discussion thread: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-discussions/Discussion-page-for-users-affected-by-the-editor-change/td-p/1222979/page/2

I'm saddened to report that I'm convinced that the welcome availability of deprecated macros in the new editor is all a horrible mistake.

Check out the following page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/section-macro-724765280.html (which was last modified on Dec 31, 2019).

It says the SECTION macro has been removed, but if you check the new editor (as of today Jan 07, 2020) you will find it is available in the list of macros and it can be included in a new-editor page.

As is the case with new macros, however, it isn't possible to nest them, and the SECTION macro is no exception. The COLUMN macro should be inserted within a SECTION macro, but when you attempt to do so, it simply drops below it. That makes the SECTION macro pointless, and that confirms my suspicion that this is all an unfortunate mess.

Prepare yourselves for bad news, folks.

[Shrey]

As some of you may have noticed and pointed out the old macros started to reappear in the new editor recently - some of them worked and some of them didn’t. The return of the old macros to the new editor via the macro browser was unintentional and came up as a bug in the system. We sincerely apologize if this raised any false hopes for anyone, as that was not our intention. We are going to need to turn them off once again since technically they aren’t compatible or reliable in the new editor and are likely to break or cause issues if used. They also introduce duplication of macros in the editor. With that being said, the fact that we’re turning them back off doesn’t mean we’re not listening, reading, and prioritizing all of your feedback - as some of them may come back either as they used to work or in new ways as we’ve done with other macros. Again, this was a bug and shouldn’t have happened. We’re sorry.

Confluence Cloud Product Management team

[Rory Apperson]

@ShreyThanks for the update.  I'm wondering how long an issue has to "gather interest" before it's transitioned to a new state?  In particular, I'm looking at https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65363 ("Bring back advanced Link Search on the new editor"). 

Anyone else, I'm really interested to know how y'all operate when creating content that heavily links to other pages in your site.  I create a lot of content with such links, but I can no longer search for them.  Labels is a pretty useful feature when searching for pages you don't know the name of but do know the subject matter; however, they can no longer be used when creating a link.

The new editor provides a list of recently-visited pages, but that isn't helpful if you haven't recently visited the page.  Furthermore, pages seem to drop off of that list if you go to other pages.  In other words, there seems to be a limit to the number of pages in that list.

[Tom Crowley]

"We apologise for briefly improving the editor. Please be assured that it was an accident and we will endeavour to not do it again. We also apologise for interrupting your search for a viable wiki alternative by letting you believe we had listened to your feedback and were finally acting on it."

[Kelvin Hill]

@Shrey  I have liked your comment for its honesty despite my being thoroughly disappointed by its content (as, I'm sure, are many others).

You said, "We are going to need to turn them off once again." I don't wish to point out the obvious, but every hour that they erroneously persist in the product is another hour than an unquantifiable number of users will be unwittingly including them in new-editor pages. It's one thing to face the imminent migration of a mountain of old-editor pages, but the prospect of migrating/cleansing new-editor pages, too, is a whole extra layer of messiness.

Surely an Atlassian developer can hide those macros from the browser in a few minutes and stem the ongoing damage. If the developers need help hiding content, I'll be pleased to explain how to do it. I'm being facetious, of course, because the developers will know how to do it with their eyes closed, which therefore begs the question of why the legacy macros are still visible. Why are they still visible? Be gone, useful macros.

[Tom Crowley]

@Rory Apperson I think I currently do it by opening another browser window to Confluence search, find the article that way, and copy/paste the link. I also swear a lot, but that bit is an optional step.

I know that's a pretty basic answer, but I've not worked out a better way of doing it yet.

[Kelvin Hill]

@Tom Crowley That's how we insert content links, too. We don't have a problem with it because we achieve the same end result with a little extra work. The same cannot be said of the essential macros that have been removed, reinstated, and stand to be removed a second time. We cannot achieve the same end result without them in spite of our sustained efforts.

[Rory Apperson]

@Kelvin HillI think you're underplaying it by saying "a little extra work".  I'm a fast typist and I was able in the old editor to rapidly create links to other content, I'm talking 3 seconds or less in some cases, without having to take my hands away from the keyboard and my eyes away from the screen to fumble around for the mouse.  I was very accustomed to that and found that a lot of the old editor's features allowed me to work that way.  Now it takes 5 to 10 times as long to do the same thing, and I have to lift my hand away from the keyboard, take my focus away from the screen to find the mouse, and do all the other stuff that Tom mentioned, which in my opinion is quite onerous.  Beyond that, even if I supply my own title for the link, it STILL uses the auto-generated bubbly title, and I have to re-do the title!

[Kelvin Hill]

@Rory Apperson A fast typist? You and me both (but only if a fairly consistent 70 wpm is considered relatively fast). Or rather I used to be, but the latency I'm seeing in the Fabric editor (especially in table cells) has largely put paid to my touch-typing. I may as well type with one finger.

And yes, a few extra keystrokes here and there all mount up, but they may go some way to decreasing the likelihood of experiencing RSI on account of working too efficiently on a keyboard alone. Try to avoid considering the extra tasks a burden; think of them as contributing to your overall long-term physical health (albeit at the cost of your mental health).

[Tom Crowley]

Everyone has been affected by these blanket changes in a slightly different way. We probably all mourn slightly different lost features. For any one lost feature Atlassian decides to reinstate, which in itself would be a bloody miracle at this stage, there will be several others that remain as blockers for other users.

There must be someone on the Cloud team who can tell us what is happening and why you're happy to remove features that you know are essential to our using Confluence, without just pointing us to the Roadmap.

Also, the old macros haven't been turned off yet...

[Kelvin Hill]

@Tom Crowley  You make a fair point, but I doubt the inattention to detail and the seeming disinterest in offering clarity is a matter of decency. I'm sure we can agree that decency is a personal attribute, and I suspect there is nothing personal about this trainwreck. What's going on here smacks of rigid enforcement of company policy or perhaps even cultural dissonance.

Maybe the culture in which you and your company operate places greater expectations on individuals to behave in a manner that fosters trust and cooperation. If so, that's great. Your customers will enjoy the benefits of that.

It wouldn't surprise me, however, to learn that many of the Confluence Cloud team are grinding their teeth with elevated levels of anxiety arising from inflicting such disarray upon the customer base. Imagine how frustrating it must be for them, too; wanting to explain the ungodly mess but being forbidden from doing so. I'm confident the team has been pleading with management to offer greater transparency and get this circus sorted out, but what should they do if those higher in the chain refuse to allow it?

Let's not question individual decency. The team is simply doing the best job they can within the constraints of their cultural framework, even though the politics of that framework may be incomprehensible to those whose business culture insists that the customer is valued and their needs are legitimate. Again, that isn't the fault of the team; it is an indictment of the business culture in which the team operates.

Poor, poor Confluence Cloud team. I feel your pain.

"The day soon cometh when thou shalt rise up and smite thy managerial oppressors."
The Book of Confluence, chapter 2, verse 8.

[Tom Crowley]

@Kelvin Hill Yeah, good point. I did used to suspect it was possibly something imposed on them by higher up, because why else you'd wilfully release something that generates this kind of backlash and then stick to it, but any Feedback to the Founders I, and other users, have provided seems to have been ignored. I suppose you could always try raising your concerns there (I can't remember the link off the top of my head, but you should be able to search for it).

I just want answers now though. I want someone to break taboo and say "look, we hate it too, but deadlines are deadlines and the investors and the board want us to release what we've got so here we are..." or if it is going according to plan, to tell us what we need to do to change the plan.

I posted similar thoughts way back, but no one told me where the decision came from. Either way, I do empathise with them for turning up to work each day and logging in to their accounts only to be reminded of the mess to which they are contributing, wilfully or not.

EDIT: Found the link: https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

[Tom Crowley]

Rejoice, y'all. The latest "What's new" post is out: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-January-2020-Edition/ba-p/1265275

(Spoiler; if you're not a premium subscriber, you only get 2 out of 3, and you already had them anyway.)

January sees the following new features:

• Expand macro
• Status macro
• Inspect permissions admin tool

[Kelvin Hill]

If anyone would like to see the Status macro being used in a way that Atlassian wasn't expecting, check it out here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vgnxfKal8vbK0PpJ0JzD65y7fMCGkH4A

If Atlassian doesn't want us to use legacy macros in the new editor, why are they still available?

I wanted to share an animated GIF, but I can't do that here. Instead, I've posted a link to an MP4 video from my Google Drive folder.

[Bob Sovers]

Last fall their was an "Ask Me Anything" session with Pratima Arora, Atlassia's "Head of Product" for Confluence Cloud.    ( https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-discussions/CLOSED-Join-Pratima-Arora-Atlassian-s-Head-of-Product-for/td-p/1199266)

Our questions were not really answered, accept to point to the roadmap.  I've just about given up trying to get anything useful out of Atlassian.  Unfortunately, like many others, in the past I successfully argued for the adoption of Confluence for our system documentation efforts.  Now I am hamstrung by my success at this.  I am stuck with the Confluence Cloud PoS

I have found that comments on this site only bolster my belief that I am not alone.  I am the eternal/sarcastic optimist who believes that maybe Atlassian will pay attention TO ITS PAYING CUSTOMERS.  But I am rapidly loosing any hope in that.

... As is, this is only a place to vent our frustrations, and possibly offer a helping hand/crutch to everyone else in our situation.  It no longer appears that Atlassian cares!

[Shannyn Johnson]

I just realized, that among the many things not in the new editor, I can't make custom panels anymore. So much for my company colors and handy information boxes. Sharepoint documents are looking better all the time. 

[Michael Corvin]

All our gnashing of teeth and wailing is quite probably 'in the noise' as far as Atlassian management is concerned since they are seeing this:

which must mean that they are doing everything awesomely well...

I haven't checked whether any reviews of Confluence Cloud out in the wider interwebs and tech sites has started to reflect our disappointments, but perhaps "we few, we <no longer> happy few" long time evangelists, admins and fanboys should see to it that they do....