Are you happy with Confluence Qs as a replacement for Answers?

[JamieA]

I am not. It's much harder to use. The new editor is very slightly better, but doesn't make up for all the other disadvantages. After a spell when Atlassian pulled out all the stops to make sure the migration was successful, the pace of improvements seemed to have dropped to zero.

On a personal level, I am perpetually frustrated by the broken email notifications.

My efficiency at dealing with requests on my plugins is way down, due to the useless labels.

Anyone have any suggestions about how to improve this? Maybe @Joe Clark [Atlassian] ?

[Joe Clark · Accepted solution]

Thanks to @Dennis Kromhout van der Meer and @Sam Tardif for providing some input on this Question! Even though they have matched my sentiment almost exactly, I wanted to add some more concrete information to this discussion - I apologize in advance that this is a bit more of a 'wall of text', rather than individual answers and comments to things raised by individual users on this question.

What are we working on right now?

1. I've just come back from a 2 week vacation, which probably contributes to why it felt like Atlassian was being "quiet" since the migration.
   
   
2. As Sam mentioned, the Confluence Questions dev team is working on new features and ideas that have backed up while they were focussed on AAC ("Answers.Atlassian.Com").  In the long term, Sam and I have had a number of discussions about how we can ensure that AAC can continue to receive attention from them on an on-going basis. 
   
   
3. We have been working hard behind the scenes to stabilize some of the back-end stuff that went on during the Answers migration.  This involves things like updating how our data warehouse synchronizes information from Answers, cleaning up the Atlassian ID integration, setting up staging and development environments and updating our operating procedures now that AAC is on a new application platform.   We just hit a major milestone today - we've finally got a staging server up and running! This is going to give us the ability to be more confident about upgrades to AAC production, so updates should now start becoming faster and more regular.
   
   
4. In tandem with this background work, and in response to this discussion, my #1 priority for Answers right now is digging in to our data warehouse and seeing how the health or our community has been impacted by the migration. Are we still getting the same quality & quantity of answers? Have we lost some of our top users? etc.  I'm actually focussing on this over making any more customizations or changes to Answers, but those will still be scheduled in the short term.

What feedback has been raised by users and when will it be fixed?

Here I'm attempting to summarize all the specific, actionable feedback discussed on this question and what we think about when they'll be fixed.  These are my opinions, and may not necessarily match up with what the Confluence Questions dev team can or will implement.

If you want to discuss any of these items in more detail, let's have that discussion on the relevant JIRA issue - I think it will easier to keep the discussion focussed and relevant there, rather than all mixed in here.

Problem	Issue Key	Status
New email notifications break gmail threading	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1355	Fixed - waiting to deploy to AAC
Labels are not displayed by popularity	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1357	Fixed - waiting to deploy to AAC
Label merging	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-798	Short term roadmap ("top 5")
Better label integration with Marketplace add-ons	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1536	Long term roadmap. Even on the old answers, this experience was not very good, so the urgency is slightly less.
Reputation permission for creating labels	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1509	Short term roadmap ("top 5")
Swag redemption is not discoverable	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1537	Short term roadmap ("top 5")
View count on Questions	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-477	Long term roadmap - we think this would be valuable, but architecturally it's not straight-forward and needs some better effort into discovering how this is going to work in a scalable fashion.
Comments cannot be up-voted	Liking: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-266 Voting: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1362	This is not on the roadmap right now. The old Answers did not allow up-voting of comments, so it's not really a regression of behaviour. Plus, if we did allow up-voting, we'd also need to consider the order of comment display - would we move to highest votes first? If so, would that make the discussion on comments confusing? There's a lot of effort here, for what seems like slightly less value. "Liking" comments on the other hand, is a feature that we lost from the old Answers. I think this makes sense in the long term, especially since Liking content is already a feature of Confluence. I agree that liking comments was a nice part of the community feel and interaction that existed on the old site. It would be nice to get this back eventually, but I think there are bigger issues we can work on to help this.
Banning users is not working	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1415	Fixed - waiting to deploy to AAC
Better duplicate detection and handling?	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-786	I'd like to see this on the long-term roadmap. I think this could be beneficial, and a selling point, for Confluence Questions as a product. However, it needs some good thought and design into building a great experience.
No rich text comments	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1173	This is not on the roadmap right now. Everyone agrees this would be awesome, but there are some serious, challenging technical hurdles with the Confluence editor before this would be possible.
Editing comments	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-265	Very unfortunately, this is not on the roadmap right now. We are still working out how editing comments would work without the rich-text support that we really want. If there is serious community demand for this feature (I think there is?), then I am considering building a custom hack for Answers that would let you "replace" a comment with a new one, but you wouldn't be able to edit.... this is just skunkworks thinking - no promises!
Comments run together - need better visual distinction	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1321	This is on the long term roadmap - it needs the attention of a visual designer, and they are in short supply in Atlassian. I would like to actually wait and see a bit with this one. I agree that the visual distinction of comments is different, and maybe slightly worse than the old Answers, but I wonder if we all just need to take some time to adjust to it, and then it doesn't feel so bad? Let's re-assess in a couple of months?
Multiple accepted answers	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1353	This is not on the roadmap right now. I need to confirm with the dev team, but I think this was a conscious design decision to only allow 1 accepted answer. StackOverflow only allows a single accepted answer, and actually there is some good discussion on their meta site about why they chose this - meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2786/accept-multiple-answers-or-split-bounty-among-several-users Maybe there are some alternatives we could consider to reward or thank people who contribute "good" answers (but not the best one)? I'd like to give this more thought in the future.
Badges	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-363	This is on the long term roadmap. I know the Confluence Questions dev team would like to spend more time designing and thinking about this - looking for ways to make the experience even better than what is a "normal" badges experience.
Tables in content	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1170	This is not on the roadmap right now. As you can see, I'm using this right now! The editor supports it if you paste in a table, but it's not exposed by the editor. This was a conscious design decision by the dev team to make answering questions as simple as possible. I kind of agree that it's only in small, certain cases that you need this kind of advanced formatting, so the benefit of adding this in doesn't exceed the benefit of having a nice, simple experience for normal & new users. There are alternatives available, like using headings and bulleted lists to add format to your question. I feel like power users want this feature, and I hope that power users can learn to paste tables in to use them? Not ideal, I know, but at least there's a work-around!
Split user profiles in CQ standalone	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1188	I would like to see this on the long term roadmap, but I don't know how the Confluence Questions team feels about this. If they disagree, i think we might consider a customization just for Answers that tries to solve this.
Missing content preview before posting	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1133	This is not on the roadmap right now. I believe it was a conscious design decision - we want the Confluence WYSIWYG editor to be so good that you don't need a preview mode. Personally, I don't miss this feature very much - I didn't use it much in the old Answers either. I can always copy and paste my content into a Confluence page and hit preview if I want to check what it looks like (in fact, I did this for this Answer!) I would love to hear more concrete examples from users on when and why the preview mode is really useful.
Where are my points coming from?	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1367	This is on the short term roadmap ("top 5")
Remove the "follow this topic" helper	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1333	This is on the short term roadmap ("top 5")
Reminder to accept answers	https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1091	This is on the short term roadmap ("top 5")

What other things are on the radar?

Look at the "migration-warranty" label in the CQ project on jira.atlassian.com

https://jira.atlassian.com/issues?jql=project = CQ and labels = "migration-warranty" and resolution = unresolved

Additionally, I would like to see https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-791 and https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-209 get some attention soon. These are kind of "medium term" roadmap - as in, I would like to see them in the "top 5" as soon as the current top 5 is handled.

What other questions or concerns are there?

Is there less traffic on Answers since we migrated to Confluence questions?

Short answer, no.  Raw page views from Google Analytics is looking good.  Overall activity (questions + answers + comments + votes) is looking OK, too - I think there has been a slight dip in the Answer rate, which worries me a little bit and I'm going to look into this in more detail.

Grouped by week since Jan 2014horizontalPage views on Atlassian Answersvertical640false480barfalse

Week	Page Views
2014-01-05	198589
2014-01-12	208252
2014-01-19	218857
2014-01-26	229270
2014-02-02	231833
2014-02-09	237573
2014-02-16	234045
2014-02-23	239374
2014-03-02	239345
2014-03-09	238321
2014-03-16	244436
2014-03-23	240602
2014-03-30	245389
2014-04-06	248498
2014-04-13	224724
2014-04-20	229703
2014-04-27	229344
2014-05-04	245926
2014-05-11	261872
2014-05-18	254328
2014-05-25	218191
2014-06-01	238659
2014-06-08	231992
2014-06-15	245341
2014-06-22	248678
2014-06-29	235907
2014-07-06	251988
2014-07-13	252960
2014-07-20	255201
2014-07-27	244656
2014-08-03	255437
2014-08-10	244558
2014-08-17	258166
2014-08-24	253819
2014-08-31	236386
2014-09-07	255748
2014-09-14	256600
2014-09-21	250087
2014-09-28	235991
2014-10-05	243184
2014-10-12	247154

horizontaltruevertical640png480bar

week	Questions	Answers	Comments	Votes
2014-01-06	543	839	822	356
2014-01-13	576	844	756	349
2014-01-20	531	828	786	324
2014-01-27	585	836	885	392
2014-02-03	578	926	753	345
2014-02-10	656	874	895	367
2014-02-17	587	906	871	338
2014-02-24	612	847	868	345
2014-03-03	647	875	920	347
2014-03-10	620	898	828	427
2014-03-17	608	949	996	361
2014-03-24	568	897	911	436
2014-03-31	642	953	938	417
2014-04-07	646	928	947	502
2014-04-14	527	863	800	396
2014-04-21	546	873	855	384
2014-04-28	558	854	949	432
2014-05-05	601	927	894	539
2014-05-12	629	1073	1068	472
2014-05-19	609	998	1053	460
2014-05-26	551	748	654	293
2014-06-02	526	791	809	329
2014-06-09	497	852	916	344
2014-06-16	548	926	949	334
2014-06-23	605	989	904	377
2014-06-30	531	784	755	293
2014-07-07	533	779	826	339
2014-07-14	577	797	731	411
2014-07-21	541	830	783	444
2014-07-28	503	852	748	327
2014-08-04	533	791	863	385
2014-08-11	527	884	865	346
2014-08-18	590	848	901	359
2014-08-25	500	795	807	330
2014-09-01	275	457	520	249
2014-09-08	628	892	703	634
2014-09-15	564	885	794	654
2014-09-22	539	840	755	675
2014-09-29	502	686	622	606
2014-10-06	567	745	698	640
2014-10-13	562	722	693	526
2014-10-20	442	552	499	357

Are the top users still as active at answering questions as they were before?

The short answer is, I'm not sure yet.  It looks like we have seen some decline in activity.  For Nic, Jobin and Jamie especially, their numbers are down.  There are also some other top users who we haven't seen in a while - but it started before the migration.

This could be a natural attrition in users, or it could be directly related to the migration (I know for Jamie I think it is directly related to the migration ).

On the analysis side, this is my #1 concern. If our top users aren't happy, it's a serious problem and we want to do everything we can to fix it.

Here's some of the numbers I was looking at:

Grouped by week since Jan 2014verticalAnswers by Top Userstruevertical500true2000yyyy-mm-ddbar

week	Nic B.	Jobin K.	Jamie E.	Renjith V.	Bob S.	Rambanan P.	Timothy C.	Henning T.	Andy B.	Joseph C.
2014-01-13	85	20	2	4	13	40	8	11	9	0
2014-01-20	62	17	2	0	15	0	4	13	6	0
2014-01-27	74	17	2	0	7	7	3	28	10	3
2014-02-03	88	17	12	0	9	5	14	14	4	3
2014-02-10	103	14	0	0	23	15	5	20	3	3
2014-02-17	89	10	4	0	9	15	7	8	11	2
2014-02-24	77	10	6	0	7	7	11	21	6	5
2014-03-03	77	10	4	1	8	8	0	18	2	2
2014-03-10	45	9	5	3	11	11	8	13	6	2
2014-03-17	87	7	8	0	4	12	2	20	3	2
2014-03-24	87	10	4	0	10	18	10	0	5	2
2014-03-31	76	17	9	0	2	5	15	1	0	4
2014-04-07	69	17	15	0	11	2	6	1	2	5
2014-04-14	61	12	6	0	6	0	7	0	0	2
2014-04-21	92	13	6	0	3	0	13	0	2	1
2014-04-28	82	14	9	0	7	0	14	0	2	1
2014-05-05	103	21	5	0	7	0	27	2	1	1
2014-05-12	101	16	8	0	8	0	32	4	7	0
2014-05-19	56	12	5	0	8	1	22	0	5	2
2014-05-26	62	10	9	0	7	1	19	3	2	4
2014-06-02	86	13	0	0	2	0	24	0	1	7
2014-06-09	76	24	6	0	7	0	11	1	5	7
2014-06-16	71	19	11	1	5	0	18	6	2	5
2014-06-23	68	10	9	0	7	0	23	4	4	1
2014-06-30	91	11	9	2	6	0	10	0	5	2
2014-07-07	73	7	9	0	9	0	17	1	12	6
2014-07-14	83	10	17	0	2	2	22	0	3	2
2014-07-21	82	21	12	0	4	0	14	0	0	3
2014-07-28	67	6	20	0	10	1	8	0	5	4
2014-08-04	81	1	12	0	4	0	0	0	3	1
2014-08-11	61	2	15	0	3	1	0	0	3	0
2014-08-18	81	16	0	0	3	1	13	0	1	1
2014-08-25	100	8	30	0	2	1	2	0	1	1
2014-09-01	50	4	19	0	4	0	0	0	7	0
2014-09-08	59	0	10	0	2	1	10	0	0	0
2014-09-15	71	46	21	9	0	1	4	0	1	0
2014-09-22	85	29	8	0	1	0	9	1	0	0
2014-09-29	60	13	20	0	2	0	0	2	0	1
2014-10-06	65	14	15	0	1	0	11	0	1	0
2014-10-13	81	9	21	0	2	0	9	0	0	0
2014-10-20	55	21	19	0	0	0	11	3	0	0
2014-10-20	55	21	5	0	0	0	0	0	1	0

We're not getting enough visibility into what Atlassian is doing with Answers

I agree - this is my fault for not communicating well enough.  I think I should get into the habit of blogging when we deploy an upate to Answers, or do some new analysis on the community - I've made a mental note to strive to improve here.

It feels like less of a "community" and it's hard to see the 'current' activity on the site

I agree it feels different, and the "popular" and "unanswered" filters on the dashboard don't feel quite right - I think they might be weighting things slightly too heavily. I need to dig more into this.

We also need to understand the natural human opposition to change and appreciate that it might take a few months for us to find a new rhythym.  

Specific, actionable feedback about how we can improve in this area is much appreciated!

[Adrien Ragot 2]

An interesting indicator would also be the questions' "mean time to resolution". Whether people don't tick off the right solution, whether people are still motivated to answer, whether participants do see the question and so on: This indicator would summarize well whether Answers helps people find the right answers or not. Apart from this addition, excellent work on summarizing the status!

[Norman Abramovitz]

Where would you like to continue the discussions on voting/liking comments, support for multiple answers ,question sort order and comment editing. 1) I think voting/liking was actually the same thing. Users got karma points if your comment was liked. 2) I think multiple answers is absolute necessity for user karma points and Answers. I think the comparison to stackoverflow is flawed since answers has different goals. See question https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/9876324/is-it-possible-to-create-issues-for-service-desk-customers as a good example of multiple answers.. 3) You are missing the most important question sort order by activity which was the only sort order I used in the old answers. 4) Editing comments is a necessity just to fix typos if nothing else.

[Norman Abramovitz]

I know my answer/comment rate is way down because I cannot edit comments. I reread my comment and wanted to add some more. Since there is no preview I needed to save my comment. I cannot see my completed comment let alone see my comment while typing since the new answers only provides 3 lines to type a comment in. Going off to another program to compose/edit comments is not a solution.

[Joe Clark]

Thanks Adrien - We have stats on mean-time-to-answer and % accepted rate in our internal reporting systems - I've made a note to go have a look at them and post back some information here. Norman - thanks again for the detail: - Discussion on voting/liking comments can happen on CQ-266 or CQ-1632. I'm treating them as separate things as "liking" would mean only a "vote up" option, while "voting" suggests being able to vote up _and_ down. - I've added your feedback on multiple accepted answers to CQ-1353. - I think that "recent" sort order for questions is supposed to be similar/the same as "order by activity" - are you finding it insufficient or inaccurate? Can you share more details? - Comment editing discussion is on CQ-265.

[JamieA]

For some reason I didn't see this answer, or if I did it got substantially elaborated and I didn't get an email about that. Thanks Joseph, that is a wealth of information. I noticed from your chart that Nic is out of control, someone must stop him NOW!

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

Hi Jamie, Ramiro; 

To start on a positive note, I think it's pretty cool that you guys really liked the old version of Answers, as we worked very hard over the past few years to get the platform to a state that the community was happy with. When we decided to move to Confluence Questions, we worked very close together with the CQ development team to get as much feature parity as possible. We tested as much as possible with private and public beta testing, which allowed us to squash a whole bunch of bugs and improve our feature set before it was even migrated.

However, I can totally understand your frustration with the current state of Confluence Questions; we're not fully there yet and we realize that. My apologies if it seems that the pace of improvements has dropped to zero - I can assure you that we're working hard behind the scenes to make it better than the old platform ever could be. Here's a JIRA filter of the issues that we're working on: LINK

I hope you have the patience and faith to help us build a better future for Atlassian Answers.

Jamie, I'll see if I can find a way to solve those bugs as quickly as possible, thanks for reporting!

Cheers,
Dennis

[JamieA]

Thanks Dennis. I should have presented that in a bad-news-sandwich like Radu suggested, wasn't meaning to give the impression that it's all bad. If my two issues I outlined are dealt with properly, I will be a happy bunny; my third issue is way below those in terms of importance to me. And it's great that CQ seems like a platform where you could build new, useful functionality, unlike OSQA. Thanks for bumping the priority of those two.

[Ramiro Pointis]

Dennis I just realized, there won't be any more Atlassian swag?

[Davin Studer]

@Ramiro Pointis There is still a swag section. https://answers.atlassian.com/plugins/swag/myswag.action

[Ramiro Pointis]

Glad to know that :)

[Ramiro Pointis]

Didn't realize it was in profile...

[Radu Dumitriu]

We all have learned that communicating bad news is always in a sandwich (good, bad - what you really want to say, and then good again). Let's start mine:

First, it is good that we'll have one more product for sale.

However, CQ is missing some features. Labels is no way to go, sorry to say that. Comments cannot be upvoted, and cannot be traced in anyway. They also lack clear separation between them. I do not want to automatically subscribe to some questions if I just put a comment on it.   Banning users is not working (last time I checked). On the front page, seems that some questions are pinned there. I'm not so active anymore, but clearly the site has lost some appeal. Answers should also organize knowledge so users will not ask N-th time the same thing: I had the impression that CQ will help you doing that, too.

Anyway, I like the new editor and the fact that some lines are cleaner and inline with the AUI.

[Mirek]

I am feeling that in the old version it was easy to get up to date with the questions or answers. I am also feeling that there was more traffic (people contributed more on a question). Now it seems that after a day o two it will be lost somewhere. I suppose that this is because of the new (strange) model of sorting questions and not so good notification model. I was bringing one of this case up some time ago in below question but it seems that nobody can explain that...

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/8620734

And I agree.. No new features/fixed bugs.. It was a high pressure to migrate to CQ and now it seems that our feedback from beta testing will not be implemented soon... Such a small things like number of views, or colorizing questions to easily navigate cannot be even implemented..

@Dennis Kromhout van der Meer, we are patient, but if you would like to be fair with us please paste a list of things that will be implemented with a specific release date not only link to JIRA so we can track this. After that we will be able to follow that and wait. We do not even know how often and when you are making changes to Answers.. Maybe we can also give more feedback for upcoming new features. If we do not know on what you are working on then it is hard to do it.. I think that for example one single Confluence page with a list of JIRA issues using a JIRA Issue Macro and few other information is not a big effort.

Atlassian Answers was created for users to be able to help other users. If we cannot easily navigate and relatively quickly get an answer on our question/s then something is wrong. I am personally not in 100% happy also how this is done right now, and there are two other heavy users like @Jamie Echlin [Adaptavist] or @Ramiro Pointis, it seems that there should be a red light turned on somewhere..

[Ramiro Pointis]

My 'top fear' is maybe Answers won't be like it was before. Why? Because now that answers is CQ -which is a product for all the customers- the improvements here will be restricted by the needs of all the customers, not only for the benefit of this community.

As Bryan Rollins said once:

"Sometimes, no matter how many votes a request has or how much overall feedback we have, we will "Close - Won't Fix" a feature request. (...) In many cases, we decide that the complexity of adding a feature may help one set of customers but hurt a much larger set of customers by making the product more complex." (https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/110373)

So, there will be improvments worth to develop for the AA community but not for the customers so I believe those will be the 'Close - Won't Fix' future requests.

[Davin Studer]

Here are my thoughts on what I like and what I don't.

Likes

• The WYSIWYG editor in my opinion is better than the old one. I love the code macro. So, much easier than the old platform.
• I like that I only get new question notifications and then updates on the question only after I comment on it. The old one you would get new question and answer notifications if you were subscribed to the topic. Which could be lots of emails.
• Looks nicer.
• Drag drop/cut paste support for images and attachments. It makes doing screen caps a cinch.
• Many of the Confluence macros work in Questions ... even though they are not viewable in the macro browser.
• It's built off Confluence so it has the opportunity to gain features from the development they put into Confluence.

Dislikes

• No WYSIWYG editor in comments (huge deal).
• No editing comments.
• No voting on comments. Thus there is less interaction with existing answers and more full answers.
• Comments  run together because there is no visual distinction between them.
• Cannot vote multiple answers as the accepted answer.
• Most of the gamification has been removed. I know it seems cheesy, but the badges and upvoting on comments was an important part.
• No table button in the editor
• User profile and activity are two separate places ... why?
• The "What do you want to know?" bar looks too much like a search bar. I say put an ask question button in the header and then either get rid of the top right search and make it the search or get rid of it and make the top right the search. It's confusing having two search-like boxes on the page.

[Norman Abramovitz]

In the old system you did not need to get emails based upon topics. I only got emails on questions I responded to. It you are not careful in the new system, it is too easy to register for topic emails since a popup occurs.

[Norman Abramovitz]

You can edit a comment in the new system in a convoluted way. Convert your comment to an answer. Edit. Then convert the answer back to a comment. There is a dropdown that you can choose the answer the comment belongs too. The dropdown is almost completely useless since it displays the complete answer, so it is virtually impossible to choose the answer. What I need to do is click on the dropdown and then use the arrow keys to move through the list without displaying the question. The username is displayed, so I was able to choose the answer I wanted my comment attached to.

[Jose M.]

Why not delete the comment and add it again? This is what I am doing until the "permission" to edit comments is implemented.

[Norman Abramovitz]

I am hoping that there is an audit trail behind these entries and hopefully it will show it was the same entry verses something removed and added. The old answers had a way to let you know that the entry was edited when you received the email. notification.

[Davin Studer]

Sure there are workarounds for editing comments by doing convoluted things, but really fundamentally the ability to edit a comment it missing.

[Norman Abramovitz]

Completely agree comment editing is required, but if Atlassian is applying there bug fixing policy, it may take awhile to get comment editing.

[Norman Abramovitz]

I would like to see updates more often as well even if updates are only one issue at a time.   I know the Answers team is working on issues, but they need to let the community know as well in a more active way.   Maybe the way the post messages, the Answers team can post status about issues people are concerned about.  

I also find it difficult to participate in answering questions because I cannot get a sense from the website that questions are being responded to.   I do not get email messages because I do not want them filling my email box. Even if I did get email messages, I try not looking at personal emails during work hours.  

I really miss the the order of questions by activity.

[Norman Abramovitz]

I also miss knowing where my points are coming from. I see that my count has gone up, but I have absolutely no way of knowing whom gave me those points even through email notifications.

[Ramiro Pointis]

+1 I can relate to this too.

[Jose M.]

I was not using answers that long, but my impression is, that moving to Confluence was not an improvement. I agree with the other statements and would like to remember the point: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/4981816. This was such a familiar function in the previous answers and it is so familiar in Jira, that I wonder, why it wasn't implemented from the beginning.

This seems just nice to have, but it is so useful to review the posting as it will be in the final state. Maybe the editor is WYSIWYG, but what about the comments?

[John Paz]

Can confirm: missing the preview hurts my soul.

[Ramiro Pointis]

I've been thinking this too since the migration. It seems like all the improvements we been getting they all go away again. I miss a couple of things. And the same as you said the new editor is better but the UX and the navigation trought the questions is much harder.

It's obvious that Atlassian wants to use their own products, but I can see that CQ is like a 70% in compare with the previous AA.

But I'm not saying that it was a bad choice, it's just they should check all the improvments we asked and bring all to the CQ. It will a big waste of time.

[Sergey Svishchev]

Since the original site and this one both draw upon the popularity of original StackExchange, the missing feaures are jarring.

The notifications debacle killed the site for me, I used to monitor questions in a dozen closely related tags, now... why settle for less, when there is the original?

[Frank Stiller]

What i really like is the new labels functionality. I can add labels which usually make sense (probably that can be working against us also). E.g. in the old answers system no one cared (at least what i recognized) what the tags/labels were on a question, so usually the tags gave no trace to the actual component the requester wanted to know something about (the plugin he had a question for). There was not once a "moderator" around which updated these. 

With the "open" approach now, i can maintain that (linking to the plugins i care for, e.g.), so the same question can be found at the actual product (like a FAQ). Without a history they can probably be removed in the same manor.

What i like from other platforms e.g. is the "Correct Answer", "Helpful Answer" feature (both platform did not have that) but maybe it will come. Sometimes the first answer is not the correct one, but a helpful one 

[Norman Abramovitz]

I am surprised by your labels(tags) comment since you were able to add and create tags in the old system. There was even a badge for creating new taxonomy. I think the new system enforces a tag while the old system did not.

[JamieA]

I am surprised too. The labelling is my biggest bugbear with the new system.

[Frank Stiller]

i cant remember i was able. Maybe it was possible on creation of a question, but thats not my use case. in 99% the labels already present are fine, so new labels are not really a clever thing anyway. What the new system can and the old one could not was to update these labels on a existing question. In most cases the question opener does not properly add the best suitable tags, so i am happy with the new system on updating them. Were you able to add/update tags on existing questions?

[Radu Dumitriu]

Yes, you could.

[Jorge]

I was not that active user of Answers so maybe my input is not as valid as others, but i'm extremly happy that Atlassian did this migration. In my company, Confluence Questions was a very hard sell when even Atlassian was not using it themselves.

Inside my company we are quite laggards when it comes to social collaboration so the very basic CQ functionality was already a big step. But we are for sure very eager to see CQ develop in the future.

Especially in the areas of UI where OSQA's simplicity was really great.

[John Paz]

Aside from the inherent awkwardness that we all experience using new software, I'm a believer, and the snappy responsiveness of the new AA will make this seem worth it in the end. 

The preview is easy to fix I imagine, but I never imagined I'd miss such a small feature so much.

[Norman Abramovitz]

Interesting, I feel it is less responsive. The more I use the show more link, the more I do not like it.

[Pablo Beltran]

It is maybe a brilliant add-on for Confluence, but a it is bad replacement of the older Answers portal at this stage.

Now the community has become an user base to get testing and feedback of an Atlassian's product, furthermore Atlassian has optimized the investments on Answers, so well played. The only complaint is the impatience.

[JamieA]

I agree with you, more or less. Personally I don't mind being co-opted into doing testing their product, it makes sound business sense after all. But for that to work, the Atlassian side of the deal is to fix things that are clearly broken, quickly.

[Pablo Beltran]

You see. All from us are doing just like Atlassian expected: provide a lot of complains and feedback to improve Answers. Sure, they would make a great product at the end. In the meanwhile, as I community user, I feel like a hostage of the Atlassian's business.

[Radu Dumitriu]

Hostage is much of a word. The name of this song is penguin in bondage, An' it's a song that ah, deals with the possible variations on A basic theme which is...well, You understand what a basic theme is. And then the variations include ah, manoeuvres that might be Executed with the aid of ah, extra-terrestrial gratification And devices which might or might not be supplied in a local Department store or perhaps a drugstore but at very least in One of those fancy new shops that they advertise in the Back-pages of the free press. This song suggests to the suggestible listener that the Ordinary procedure ah, That I am circumlocuting at this present time in order to get This text on television, Is that ah, if you wanna do something other than what you Thought you were gonna do when you first took your clothes off [...]

[Norman Abramovitz]

They do not need us for most of these issues listed here because they are already issues in jira.atlassian.com. I believe we just want to see those fixes come out sooner into production.

[Norman Abramovitz]

All users are guinea pigs for software products, so it does not bother me we are agents in petri dishes.. The trick is to get the users to believe that they are not. That is done by turning out releases and making users aware it is happening.

[Pablo Beltran]

No matter here or in jira.atlassian.com: they will get feedback from many channels surely. The issue here is that when they moved from the oldest forum to Answers, most people saw that it was done just to improve the channel. But I would say, this goal is not the same now. It looks like Atlassian wants to improve business over the channel itself (in the short term at least). It is something legitimate as the channel and the budged belong to them furthermore it has a lot of sense they want to optimize budgets and probably is the right decision in the long term too as they will invest on the Answers for an unlimited time as it is its product. But honestly, as a community user I miss some "respect" from Atlassian on how they are getting this. As @Dennis have mentioned, they are working very hard to solve most issues behind the scene. So my question is: why did not Atlassian wait to get a more mature version before replace it? It was so urgent? Most from you want to say Atlassian how to improve Answers while I want to say Atlassian how to improve the relationship with the community. We have different goals.

[JamieA]

It's not just that they are using us to report issues, because I agree with you, most of the issues are obvious. But they will be doing A-B testing and generally screwing with our minds. At least they should be, given they have this massive captive audience of testers. People that make our money by knowing Atlassian tools amongst other things, are already willing hostages anyway.

[Radu Dumitriu]

@Norman - obviously (I would vote your answer if I could). But don't you like a good theory? “A wise man once said, never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment.” - same FZ

[Mirek]

I can say that support.atlassian.com was also changed to JIRA Services Desk and now it seems that nothing is improving there, even that a lot of people are reporting issues..... (you cannot edit a comment too).. Personally I am having the same feeling here on Answers. The advantage of migration to CQ was that it was communicated before and there was an option to see a beta version. Big + for that. on support.atlassian.com they just changed this and you must deal with this or not..

[Norman Abramovitz]

@Radu Dumitriu Thanks for the vote.

[Sam Tardif]

Hi all, I'm the development team lead on Confluence Questions, just want to give you guys a bit more clarity on what's going on here from our side. Yes, there's a bit of a balance to strike between developing features specific for the Answers community and features for internal Q&A communities, and we haven't got that quite right yet. While we were working on features for AAC and the migration itself, we didn't have bandwidth for anything else, and so we've had a backlog of other work gradually building up. While we try and work through _that_ list of things the development team has had little time for AAC, but we're now at a point where the seesawing will slow down and we can more steadily release new shiny improvements to AAC. We've got a list of the top 5 issues affecting AAC, which is maintained by @dennis kromhout van der meer] and [~josephlclark, and we aim to steadily pick things off that list (links at the end). Please vote and comment on these issues if they're affecting your experience on AAC. With regard to the decision to move to Confluence Questions, it was definitely made with the best interests of the community at heart. Yes, it's nice for us to have a big Confluence Questions instance running, but it's more important for the product that powers the community to be actively developed and maintained. With OSQA that was harder, and involved a lot of customisations to the product. With Questions we have a larger dev team, and we want AAC to help shape the product itself rather than require after-the-fact customisations. We should have an updated version on AAC in the next week or so to address some of the issues seen after the migration, and hope to keep churning out more consistent updates for you all after that! Top 5: https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20CQ%20AND%20labels%20%3D%20aac-top5 CQ issues: https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20CQ%20and%20status%20%3D%20open%20order%20by%20votes%20DESC

[Radu Dumitriu]

How can I vote this comment ? ;-P

[Mirek]

In the Top 5 (that is actually having more issues) I do not see voting on comments, so I think we will need to wait for a little longer to see that implemented on Answers :)

[Adrien Ragot 2]

It's excellent that Answer has grown so big that it became a main part of Atlassian's identity:

• It's useful for business, since experts can show their expertise,
• It's useful for knowledge exchange.

However the new version with CQ is less satisfying than the previous version:

• It's not playful, there's not enough gamification. Badges. Points.
• The "Reputation" chart: I used to link to it to display how expert I was with Confluence, because it looked professional - thin lines, showing points when you hover, always pointing upwards and links to my activity stream. Now it just looks like a big toy - it doesn't help me look like a professional of Confluence.
• The previous Answers used to send emails and tell "Hey, are you satisfied with Joe's answer? Please mark it as resolved!". So users would tick the right answers. Now, new users forget to do it.
• No rich text in comments, and can't edit them. It severely limits the problem resolution.
• Less tags and less rich links, for example we used to be able to build a link to create a question.
• Pushy questions: "Do you want to watch the label xxx?"
• Given those inconveniences and how important Answers is to my business, I'm afraid the website may be less attractive - I hope it won't wither.

I'd like to congratulate Atlassian for:

• The code and links are much easier to insert with Confluence Questions,
• To transform an answer into a comment, the dialog displays a useful combo-box. It's much more usable than the old Answers.

Thank you for making Answers!

[Deleted user]

No, I think it's harder to use than it was previously.

Example: how do you change your notification preferences?

Silly me, I didn't read a prompt thoroughly and thought I was clicking 'follow this post'. It signed me up for everything with the tag 'confluence'. Jeepers. Won't be doing that again!

So I came in here looking for where my notification preferences are stored. I'm not entirely stupid, so I looked under Settings. Nope. Not under Profile either.  The little round ? icon that looks like it ought to provide Help just says "About Confluence", so didn't bother with that.

Did a search, and found out how to unsubscribe in the old version. Eventually, I gave up, dug one out of the bin and used the link to Unsubscribe from Everything. 

Oh well.

[Ed Schriger]

"Answers" and "Q's" both stink.

Why did you make it so hard to just get to the documentation?

[Norman Abramovitz]

This site is not meant as a documentation site. If you are looking for documentation, here is the generic url to get to all Atlassian documentation. https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation A search engine search would have found it. Yes, I agree, we should not have to resort to a search engine, but it was easy to find the documentation site.

[Vishnukumar Vasudevan]

Neither do I. 

I have been using Q&A for quite sometime. 

Missing many features here after the migration. Yea, the editor is little user friendly though. 

Not happy with the UI. 

Needs more improvements to fill in the gap we have due to the migration.