Who approved the roll-out of collaborative editing? It still has bugs!

[Kelvin A Hill]

After accidentally applying collaborative editing to our entire cloud instance (I didn't notice is wasn't space specific, nor did I notice it is a one-way street, i.e., no uninstalling if I changed my mind), I crossed my fingers and beefed up the benefits to my team. I said, "guess what, folks, I've applied collaborative editing to all 30 of our spaces. It's going to really help us."

Sadly, we have come unstuck.

We have twice encountered a situation where, when two people have collaboratively edited a document, random words have been mysteriously deleted from the document when it was saved. I'm not talking one or two, but dozens.

The deletions at the beginning or end of paragraphs first brought the bug to our attention. It was quickly evident that a paragraph was beginning with a space followed by a lower case word, and then, hang on a minute, that sentence doesn't even make sense. 

It was only when we compared the before and after versions that we discovered dozens of deletions that neither editor was responsible for.

This bug has SERIOUS implications. I raised it with Atlassian three days ago. No response yet. That's disappointing.

[Matt Lawrence]

Hi Kelvin,

I'm sorry about your frustrating experience!

Collaborative editing is being rolled out progressively to enable us to identify and fix bugs like the one you encountered.

Currently the roll out is opt-in. This enables customers who can't wait to get collaborative editing to have it right now. The feedback we receive from the opt-in customers helps us improve the feature and identify issues that can't be detected in testing.

We won't be activating collaborative editing for every customer until we're confident it is a great experience.

Thanks,

Matthew Lawrence
Product Manager, Confluence

[Kelvin A Hill]

Thanks for your response, Matthew.

I must have been too excited about collaborative editing to read the small print.

It's probably just bad luck, but the enabling of collaborative editing also appears to have coincided with a number of macros we use for layout having their behaviours changed. For example, the SPAN macro is no longer inline (so it can't be used for custom-edits on texts in a paragraph). It is now wrapped in <p> tags, which is infuriating (and effectively turns it into a DIV). I have also discovered all my DIV macros are now followed by a paragraph containing a line break, i.e., <p><br /></p>. You can see them being auto-inserted, and there's no way to get rid. I have also discovered that when I use the PANEL macro with COLUMNS in it, the columns are no longer displayed as inline-blocks. Again they are wrapping under the content that they previously sat adjacent to. Existing pages are fine until I edit something on the page, then bang, the layout changes and everything ends up wrapped in persistent <p> tags. "Annoying" doesn't quite cover it. 

[Matt Lawrence]

That extra detail helps us a lot, thanks Kelvin (I've added it to the ticket). We'll reach out to you directly via your support ticket shortly to ask for some additional details that will help our analysis.

Keeping your content safe is something we take very seriously, and I hope we can keep you excited about collaborative editing! 

[Kelvin A Hill]

Hi Rob,

As far as I'm aware, I raised a support request. It has the following URL: https://support.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/23/JST-226703.

Maybe no one has responded because they have packed their bags and run away.

[Rob Woodgate]

Yup, that's a support request all right.  In that case, the only other thing I can think of is that by default the severity level is Level 4, which means (something like) "annoying but we've got a viable workaround".  If you left it to Level 4 and Atlassian are swamped at the moment, like they probably are dealing with the new managed account switchover, your ticket may not have a high enough priority to be dealt with yet.

Or they have indeed run away.

Sorry I couldn't be more help

[Kelvin A Hill]

I added it as Level 3. Our business hasn't yet crashed and burned as a result of this bug, so I couldn't really justify marking it as Level 1 or 2.

As you say, the Atlassian support team may be inundated with issues. If not now, they certainly will be when other customers discover their pages are being randomly corrupted. Worse still is that they don't discover it, and it ends up being responsible for an embarrassing miscommunication. 

[Rob Woodgate]

Hi Kelvin,

Did you log a bug (which is a generic approach that people use to make Atlassian aware of a problem and allow others to watch and vote on) or did you raise a support request?  I've never had to wait more than a few hours for Atlassian to respond to a support request, but I have logged bugs that weren't looked at for a few days.

If you raised a bug it will be a standard JIRA ticket like this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ID-6213 

If you need to enter a support request go here https://support.atlassian.com/customer/servicedesk-portal and click Report a problem.