How to make use of this page

Hi All,

Thanks for the continued feedback and discussion. In particular Paul, Graham and Shannon have been amazingly active across several of the related pages, a big thanks!

For those new to the page, we previously found that when letting the page grow by maintaining all comments it became too slow and hard to find relevant info. To maintain it's usefulness we now do the following:

• Above in the page you can expand to see the Open and Resolved JIRA issues that people have raised. If you are having an issue, check here to see whether it's been fixed in a newer version or already been raised by someone else so you can add a comment or Watch the ticket.
• You can raise a JIRA issue in the CONF project here. Just add the 'WYSIWYG Editing' Component to your ticket and it will be displayed on this page. These tickets are actively triaged and can be linked together where they are related or are duplicates etc and gets them into the hands of the developers faster.
• I actively curating the comments on the page. I'd stopped as people questioned whether we were trying to censor any negative comments, which isn't the case, but unfortunately in practice this just makes the page less useful. 
• You can still leave comments though!  If you still wish to comment here rather than raise a JIRA ticket just include details of:
  
  • The version of Confluence you're using
  • Your OS and Browser details (eg: Mac OSX, Chrome 19)
  • Steps to reproduce your issue
• and I'll raise it for you.
• For more generic questions about how to do something I'll add them to the FAQ list. 
• If you just want to provide general feedback please do. It's been asked a few times and yes we do track all of the feedback even if it's not suitable for the FAQ or a JIRA Issue. As to the question, 'are you going to bring back wiki markup', I would draw your attention to the line in the note above from the founders that Wiki Markup is not coming back to Confluence. There's more details of the technical reasons why in the post as well.

Thanks everyone.

John
Confluence Product Manager 

I continue to be amused at the constant feedback regarding the new editor. I, too, have given up providing any feedback as the product is not getting better.  Key issues, regardless of how many votes, remain unaddressed.  I've been working with this new editor ever since it has been introduced and have to deal with it on a daily basis - cringing every time I have to work with it.

My users don't use it - it's just easier now for me to do the writing than force others too.  Good thing my doctoral in engineering is providing such as good career path ... instead of focusing on value add processes, analytical work, etc...I'm now down to writing documentation, figuring out how to create  something usable and not embarrassing to provide to our customers. 

The introduction and lack of resolution is forcing me to consider completely different companies because of the career path this product has taken me...and not one that I want to pursue....

Seriously, folks....this is supposed to be easy for writing and sharing...it should not take hours and hours to write a single page that can convey information in a meaningful way.  We work with lots of tables and images...formatting is critical for technical communications.  The editor, without markup capability, makes it impossible.  It's now easier to using Confluence as a document repository, attaching files, instead of building reusable content that is easy to create and manage.

Having all macros take the entire horizontal width makes creating and editing anything of significant content unless I'm connected to a 60" screen.  Seriously, inputting a copyright symbol requires an inch of vertical space?????

I recommended Confluence and implemented this product three times - three difference companies.  As I move on, I will never recommend this product ever again for anything other than elementary writing and a document repository.   The Atlassian team is more focused on "likes" than fixing real issues and providing real business value.

BTW- on catpcha...it's not a matter of not being able to read it...it just doesn't work.  Not sure how any fix passed a QA cycle when the same behavior occurs. And, agree with other posts...if you're logged in, there should be no reason to input a captcha, regardles of whether it is working or not...on my fourth try now...now fifth...

Don’t give up hope Atlassian — I’m considering moving our knowledge-base to Confluence and re-vamping efforts at documentation in our IT department exactly BECAUSE of the great RTE functionality in Confluence.

Wiki syntax / Markdown are fine and good for a certain crowd – myself included – but I’ll never get even the most technical people in my organization to take the time to learn another language syntax just to format text. And the office integration and copy and paste of images is just what the doctor ordered. I know all of that is nearly impossible to get working right when you are trying to keep both a wiki syntax and an visual editor in sync. I watched that exact struggle sink my favorite wiki – ScrewTurn — into closing their doors. And their RTE didn’t have 1/10th the functionality Confluence provides.

So, keep up the good work!

I like the new editor, my one complaint is the Edit/Remove popup. It covers my text while I am typing. I am forced to insert a bunch of white space to move it to the bottom of the screen. It is particularly annoying for me because of my extensive use of "numbered heading" blocks on pages that I edit- that means that all my pages are in a block, and so I see the edit/remove popup all the time.

If you could make that block show up so it is not showing up on top of my text, that would be great.

Here is a screen shot:

http://postimg.org/image/hy634v5al/

What a complete pain.  The ability to consume Wiki markup easily was one of the things which made confluence acceptable for a number of uses where automated editing was needed.  XML, a fundamentally write-only format, should never have been considered as a substitute.

Anyway, this kind of change imposed on the users even though you know most of your hardcore and most important fans would hate it, is exactly why programmers should never use proprietary tools that they can't take over if the vendor chooses to mess it up.

What makes this worst of all is that our support just migrated us to this with no warning and now there's no way to recover or back out.  I had assumed, up till today, that Atlassian wouldn't betray us and there would be a hidden way of extracting wiki text;  just very difficult to find.  Now that I read this article I know never to trust you again. 

Once again

• Warn the users you are going to change it
• Deprecate for three versions with a warning in the user interface
• Lock the feature out by default but leave it functioning for two versions
• Only then get rid of it. 

The new RTE is just to time consuming for me. I document in wiki markup, then transfer it to confluence, which works okay as long I don't ever have to edit that page again. If I do I am in for many a counter-productive minute struggling to not click in the wrong macro and muck it up. Undo does weird things at times and back spacing reeks havoc with bullet points, it's not a well polished product.

Hey Atlassian, just wanted to give a little positive feedback on the RTE now that its been in use in our small (50+) organization for a month or two.

I've been using it at our company to take Meeting minutes/notes in any meetings that I am in, and just about every meeting people say "what is this tool - do I have access?" and they come up with ideas on how they might use it.  Back when I was using my beloved ScrewTurn wiki, that never happened.  As soon as people saw the wiki markup, or they saw how badly things broke when you switch back and forth between wiki markup and RTE (again, the struggle that ultimately killed ScrewTurn IMHO), they just wrote it off in their minds as a tool for geeks. Even the most technical users (like others in the IT department) just didn't have the time to learn a "programming language" to edit documentation (I know wiki markup isn't a programming language, but as is often the case - perception is reality).

You certainly have one of the best (if not the best) wiki RTE out there, and I understand the technical reasons why RTE and wiki markup living together in harmony is a pipe dream that can bog a dev team down hard and fast. However, I will agree with others comments here that it still has some annoying quirks, and I think your developers time would be well spent actually squashing some of these.  The Source Editor has come to my rescue in a few instances (like the bullet or numbered list that won't die), but unfortunately it is only available after saving the page in my experience.

We have very few users that now use anything but the basics in Confluence.  We used to use it to create much more enriching documentation that we could provide to end users and prospects without concern.  Without the WME, we no longer have the ability because the RTE and then PDF export issues introduced with the new version.  If you attempt to do much customizing, it is extremely difficult to troubleshoot and fix - macros take up too much of the vertical space making it very difficult to look at a lot of content on one page.  The Source editor is like reading an XML file  - much different than reading what was more like html code that you could have some organization to.

So, is it good for creating minutes, overviews, basic instructions - yes.  But, we need it for much more complex tables, formatting, and image control to create the documents we started using confluence for.  Now, we are forced to attach as word documents and lose the collaboration and reuse capabilities that a wiki can provide.  And, please don't say 'go purchase a plugin'.  We already invested in the confluence licensing and had what we needed...then, it was taken away. 

I too, was one who promoted the products - introduced now to 4 companies.  Won't ever do so again until the RTE and PDF options are significantly improved or the additional WME option (something similar) is provided.  The fact that you replaced vs added as another editing option is what seems to have been infuriating folks. (especially since you have a macro that still supports the creation and others have been helpful enough to try to provide a similar solution).

It was much easier in the WME to control any types of formatting (font/style/weight/color), especially in tables; RTE is limited in the options provided.  Once you start to have an issue with formatting, especially in table content, it's nearly impossible to clear.  We have issues where we have copied content from one page to another and strange formatting comes across that is not in the original page.  I have to go to the source editor to discern what might be going on and cannot do anything...but, it's difficult to read. 

There are several bugs introduced in the PDF export that affect how tables and text display and wrap, table content, and image location.

Trying to position text to the exact position that we want is very difficult in the RTE because so much vertical real estate is applied to the begin and end tags.  We work on 15" screens - you can see a section and maybe 2 columns, if you're lucky, of content. 

We have issues where extra spaces get added between punctuation marks.  It's difficult to compress the vertical real estate and ensure you have the specific number of breaks between lines - the macros tend to input additional blank lines that we don't want.

I try using the shortcut keys, but they are often ignored - in WME, I didn't have to worry about my h3, h4, or — being ignored.  Macros didn't just refuse to display when I inserted them - in the RTE, I can type these and they are treated as literal text or paragraph style, and macros you just input don't disappear.   It didn't take me multiple clicks to open a macro editor to change the properties.

All of these issues have been reported through support and are on the original feedback pages.   My point is that the RTE and PDF export have not been stabilized nor improved to provide functionality that users had back to something that we had - it was easy to control, troubleshoot, and edit. It didn't require a developer to understand.  I realize not everyone has html capabilities - but, it was still easy to read.  

Our company (Fortune 100 company) upgraded from Confluence v3 to v5,....there has been an immense uproar by everyone here. The common consensus is that Confluence is absolutely impossible to use now! The templates are of no use,..and the loss of the wiki markup editor has caused all of the stir.

After being pointed to this page, I thought I'd find a reasonable explanation,...but all I find are similar complaints from other companies,..as well as a response from the Atlassian founders that borders on the insane. I have never seen a company that depends on its customers for success, come out and ignore, curse, and practically stamp their feet in disgust at what the customer expects from their product.

And then I find no response from the founders to any of these comments!

While I do not have direct say over how my company handles all of these complaints over the upgrade,...I do have an opportunity to collect these complaints from my colleagues, as well as the complaints I'm finding from other users and companies,...and forward them on to the CTO of our company. He does make the decisions and I don't think Atlassian will be happy with the results.

Atalssian: I implore you to consider these complaints.

P.S. What ever happened to the old adage, "The customer is always right"?

Migrating over "#" users (number withheld because company would be recognized) is a hell of a task. However the subset of those users that are actively using Confluence Wiki have great concern over this upgrade, and is probably in part reason why the migration to the new version did not yet happen. As a smaller sub-team, we used this Wiki to do all of our document writing in favor over MS word, or other "Rich Text Editor".

The simple syntax forced our contributors for a simple manageable layout, and made layout much more consistent than it ever could be. We were quite happy by "not being able to merge cells". It forced the contributors to write in a simpler flow, and resulted in easier to read documents.

Breaking with this "original native wiki" syntax, and the response to it, appears to be an unapologetic showmanship of ... well ... something. The many promises so far only resulted in a buggy editor, even simple autocomplete for bullet lists do not seem to work consistently ... after that long? And with hard to learn keyboard shortcuts for beginners, how do I explain contributors to type "{" to start a macro ... 

If xhtml was so important ... why not {xhtml} to embed those advanced layouts (merged cells etc). Now all we have are people crying, and the other party saying that we are only going ahead with it, probably hoping it will die out.

If only you could give all those other neat features without breaking the original native wiki syntax.

Next thing I will hear is that the unix community will kill vi ...

I have an idea. Why not release Confluence 3.17 as open source and let the developer community carry on with it?

I would be happy to give people like Bob Swift OSS (Bob Swift Atlassian Apps) some money for plugins. Those of us who really want to keep wiki markup will be happy and Atlassian won't have to support it.

(captcha try 1. Try 2. Try 3. Try 4. 

Why have you removed the ability to edit wiki markup directly?

The "rich" text editor is not good enough to do the job on its own. It is buggy. Tables are a pain. It keeps mangling them, giving me no confidence that I can edit a document without destroying it.

I completely understand the desire to make the text editor 'good enough' that people do not need to edit the markup. But taking markup away before it is good enough is idiotic.

Either you failed to test the editor sufficiently or you don't care about your customers. Either way you are bad.

Captcha: 1, 2

Matt, you assume people have not already read those lame excuses! People are just dumb-founded that a company would take away something that makes perfect sense. Is everyone at Atlassian just too stubborn? There's no shame in giving the customer what they want!! Microsoft just buckled under customer pressure and removed the restrictions on their new XBox One.

In fact,..read this article by James Dominguez that begins with:

"Have you ever heard or read about a big corporation making a really bad decision, and said to your friends, "They really need to just change their minds on this. They won't, of course, but they really should."

Well, in defiance of all convention, Microsoft has changed its mind."

SO, it seems Microsoft can back down,....Atlassian, get a clue! Customers WANT their Wiki Markup Editor back. NO BULLSHIT! (just using the founder's offensive phrase they used on their customers)

I'm about to type the captcha,..and the word is: shated

Hahaha,..that's exactly what Atalssian did to their customers,..they shated on us.

Looks like some posts are being conveniently deleted by Atlassian.

Really!? What's the matter Atallasian,...afraid to let customers speak up and say that they are unhappy with the current state of the product,..or your decision to remove the excellent Wiki Markup Editor?

You can't have it both ways,.... you can't post sweet sugary positive comments,.....but hide customers that have a legitimate beef with your decision to remove the WME.

Gee,...I wonder why the "flounders" had to start their justification with the words:

"Open company, no bullshit

Really? Open company, no bullshit???? Let me clue you in on something,....there are not a "few customers" are you try to believe. This will not go away until we see the WME back in the product. Oh and by the way,....that's NO BULLSHIT!

The fact that you had to write an entire document on why you felt you had to do this, and to justify why you did it in the face of customer backlash, is really telling. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: You need to fire the guy that came up with this nonsensical idea.

My company just migrated to the version (5.x.x), which took away the wiki markup editor. After experimenting with the new page editor,  I am giving up. Editing existing pages and adding is major pain. Inability to see content in its native format is another drawback. In its arrogance Atlassian decided to remove the essential part of wiki functionality, turning Confluence into a non-a-wiki knowledge management product. Many of us who are using wikies for ages, have instinctive knowledge of markup, making us useful and effective. This removes this advantage. Under the pretense of not having other users (management types) upset for seeing source editor button when they add or change pages. Congratulations Atlassian, you just wen the Microsoft way. 

As result I will be taking my team off this wiki solution and move it to Confluence-like XWiki. This one is still the true wiki engine (i.e. supports wiki markup).  It even supports Confluence's original markup.

My company converted from 3.5 to 4 last winter (we are currently on 4.3.2, and trying to avoid even looking at 5 at this point). Uproar regarding the loss of wiki markup aside, I have encountered a problematic bug. I have a documentation space that is organized using labels, with extensive use of the "Content by Label" macro throughout. This space was set up in Confluence 3 and converted over to 4. As part of a documentation update, I have to replace some labels, which would normally not be a problem except that when I edit a "Content by Label" macro, the labels applied are missing from the macro parameters. Meaning that I have NO WAY of knowing, aside from my best guess, what labels were used to generate lists of content. Somehow the information is still there, as the macros are generating correct lists of pages in View Page mode (which is why I didn't catch this problem months ago.) 

If only I still had access to wiki markup... 

In general, I find editing any pages that were converted over from 3.5 and included any use of macros is incredibly frustrating and a waste of my time. (Editing nested macros? Replacing an image in a page? UGH.)

The whole new editor has been a disaster for us.

We thought going from 4.1 to 5.x would be an improvement.... and we were half right and fully wrong. Some 4.1 bugs were fixed, and a whole slew of serious new bugs bit us directly on the sensitive parts.

God I miss the wiki editor.

You know what sucks the most for us since we lost the Wiki Markup Editor:

• The ability to view the source of a page, select a section, copy it,..and paste to a new page. This was so easy to do with the WME,..and it is now impossible now in the latest version of Confluence. What used to take 2 seconds is impossible. Great Job Atalassian! Not!
• The ability to quickly create a table via WME using the | symbols,....and the top row using ||,....again ridiculous that I MUST now use their table creation button,...or type {table  only to have it pop open a box asking which of the useless tables I want to use. Great Job Atalassian! Not!
• The ability to view the source of someone's page as an example,..only to see deeply nested tables that are super ridiculous to understand. Great Job Atalassian! Not!
• Plenty of other things have been lost since the WME was removed. You guys really suck!!! Why would you listen to some customers (biggest complainers),..but leave (what were) content customers out of the whole process??? So now,...what were your content customers, are now, your big complainers!!! Great Job Atalassian! Not!

"Seems to me,..cutting and pasting in the Wiki Markup Editor was for every user:

• Fast
• Easy
• Simple

Now,...it's:

• Slow
• Complex
• Confusing

HOW in the world could they argue with this!!!!"

And Atlassian's response is,....well,.....the sound of crickets chirping.........

What a relief to find that other people feel the same way about the removal of the wiki markup editor. after reading all the comments above,it seems that this company could care less about what their customers want.not sure i've ever seen a company not want to make their customers happy,or remove functionality with complete and utter disregard to the wants and needs of customers.perhaps the aol ceo should step in here and fire someone.

It's interesting what most people seem to fail to realize; when a product has probably millions of users, and less than a hundred vocal complainers, it doesn't make a decision even remotely wrong, it just shows that it was a difficult one to make.  This is the sort of behavior I'd expect from children, but not professionals.  If you all put a small portion of the effort you've used to complain and sulk into suggestions to make the product better (feature requests), you might find a product you really love.

If you actually read the above, you 'll see that Atlassian was listening to their customers when they made this decision.  The bottom line is that the RTE has most of the functionality of wiki (plus additional), and is easier for the vast majority of people to use.  

Take a lesson from Atlassian and "Be the change you seek" - provide some constructive criticism and let them help make the product easier for you.

Having read some of the passionate feedback on this page, I just wanted to say that I am very pleased with the Confluence editing UI. It is not perfect, but it is better than anything I've used to date, and I LOVE the priority placed on keyboard shortcuts. As I tried Confluence out, it was just natural to use it as my primary editor to type out documents, share things, create todo items, etc. - it actually motivated me to document and write since the editor was so cool to use!

I have no experience with previous versions of Confluence and can see how it would be painful to transition from full control over the markup to a wiki editor. However, Atlassian is making a strong statement by enforcing the use of their editor - now they must make the UI work to keep the product alive. I appreciate knowing that this level of commitment to usability is behind a product that I'm using.

JoshL: It's great that you're having a good experience,..and that you've never used the prior versions,..and that you want to state Atalssian's "level of commitment",...but one small problem,.....what is it that you're bringing to this conversation. "Walk a mile in our shoes" and then you might fully understand the passion that people feel for having the wiki markup editor ripped out from under their feet.

Take this Twitter post as an example of passion:

You have to understand,...other companies have made changes that their customers abhorred,..only to have the change reverted. Think Coke, Pepsi, Microsoft,....and the list goes on. For me personally,...I just don’t understand why Atlassian puts up a wall on this issue. Yes,...people are passionate,...they want WME back,....doesn't that say something about the QUALITY the WME brought to the product???? No one seems to be asking for a removal of the new RTE,...just bring back something that plenty of users find so useful,....that to use Confluence is simply a CHORE.

I'll give you an example of something that was soooo simple with the WME. You used to be able to "steal" content you found useful from other pages by editing the page with the WME,...selecting what you wanted,..and cutting and then pasting into the new page. With RTE,....it is utterly a disaster. For one thing,..you're looking at nested sets of tables that can run onto multiple pages. Try figuring out what it is that you want. Then,...even if you do take your mouse to highlight the area you want,...if you move the mouse to far, everything that was just highlighted is now, Not highlighted. Doubt me,..try it for yourself and you'll see what a pain that can be.

Paul: The RTE does NOT support copying and pasting as the prior posters have described. Have you personally tried to cut and paste a section of a Confluence page that scrolls to many pages? Me thinks you have not,....otherwise you'd agree and understand what has been described. There is also no method to do a Ctrl-F to find something on a page, but now I'm just echoing what others have been describing is one of the silliest problems with the RTE. WME was easy in that respect, and would allow searching.

Something that irks me, is the description at the beginning of this page that says, "our customers love the new RTE",  and then a bunch of Twitter posts are shown. Come on, really? No one here that I work with uses Twitter. And yet, Twitter is the measuring stick used to see if all customers are happy with the decision to remove WME and use only RTE? Very skewed sense of reality.

Paul: You're asking us to supply examples of how you can improve Confluence. Let me turn that around and ask you to take 60 minutes and read this whole thread. You'll find many many many examples, complaints, suggestions that we are experiencing every day. My colleagues are at their wits end when using Confluence without the Wiki Markup Editor. They don't have time to register a bug with Atlassian, and when it comes down to it, it's not their job to create an account, open a bug, and track whether it has been fixed or whether it will just sit there like all the other open issues regarding the problem with using the RTE, as opposed to the WME.

I'll try to help you, look at these issues:

1. macros take the entire horizontal width
2. Edit/Remove popup. It covers my text while I am typing. I am forced to insert a bunch of white space to move it to the bottom of the screen. It is particularly annoying for me because of my extensive use of "numbered heading" blocks on pages that I edit- that means that all my pages are in a block, and so I see the edit/remove popup all the time.
3. The new RTE is just to time consuming for me. I document in wiki markup, then transfer it to confluence, which works okay as long I don't ever have to edit that page again. If I do I am in for many a counter-productive minute struggling to not click in the wrong macro and muck it up. Undo does weird things at times and back spacing reeks havoc with bullet points, it's not a well polished product.
4. Backspacing is a complete nightmare
5. CONF-28561 - Confluence Page Layout goes FUBAR ( Open)
6. What people don't realize was is that they will lose much more time fighting with an buggy RTE than learning a simple Wiki syntax.
7. What would serve them well was if they allowed an "Bring back the Wiki markup" issue to stay open, and every-time people complained they said "Go Vote for it"... That would reveal just which camp was bigger.
8. But what really bugs me allot is that they seem to spend allot of effort in putting new features in rather than actually resolving the bugs that has existed since 4.0 first arrived... Even the JIRA Team has is holding back on bringing in the new editor as they don't seem to see it as being mature: JRA-8943 - WYSIWYG / Rich Text Editor ( Open) ... And what does that say about it?
9. Confluence has a habit of getting in my way though and making me spend hours fixing broken pages...

10. This has got to be the most worst company for actually listening to their customers. Just check out how many bugs are either; quashed, deferred, closed and blamed on a 3rd-Party issue or out an out, just plain ignored.

11. If you attempt to do much customizing, it is extremely difficult to troubleshoot and fix - macros take up too much of the vertical space making it very difficult to look at a lot of content on one page.
12. we need it for much more complex tables, formatting, and image control to create the documents we started using confluence for.  Now, we are forced to attach as word documents and lose the collaboration and reuse capabilities that a wiki can provide
13. The fact that you replaced vs added as another editing option is what seems to have been infuriating folks.
14. It was much easier in the WME to control any types of formatting (font/style/weight/color), especially in tables; RTE is limited in the options provided.  Once you start to have an issue with formatting, especially in table content, it's nearly impossible to clear.  We have issues where we have copied content from one page to another and strange formatting comes across that is not in the original page.
15. There are several bugs introduced in the PDF export that affect how tables and text display and wrap, table content, and image location.
16. Trying to position text to the exact position that we want is very difficult in the RTE because so much vertical real estate is applied to the begin and end tags.
17. We have issues where extra spaces get added between punctuation marks.  It's difficult to compress the vertical real estate and ensure you have the specific number of breaks between lines - the macros tend to input additional blank lines that we don't want.
18. I try using the shortcut keys, but they are often ignored - in WME, I didn't have to worry about my h3, h4, or — being ignored.  Macros didn't just refuse to display when I inserted them - in the RTE, I can type these and they are treated as literal text or paragraph style, and macros you just input don't disappear.   It didn't take me multiple clicks to open a macro editor to change the properties.
19. upgraded from Confluence v3 to v5,....there has been an immense uproar by everyone here. The common consensus is that Confluence is absolutely impossible to use now! The templates are of no use,..and the loss of the wiki markup editor has caused all of the stir.
20. simple autocomplete for bullet lists do not seem to work consistently
21. If only you could give all those other neat features without breaking the original native wiki syntax.
22. there is no chance in hell that we'll be moving to 5.x any time soon. Not with the RTE and the PDF exports in the current buggy, clunky state it's in today.
23. They simply can't understand just how important the wiki markup editor was!!! The wme was all that me and my colleagues used every day. Put simply, the new editor sucks! It is HORRIBLE!
24. The "rich" text editor is not good enough to do the job on its own. It is buggy. Tables are a pain. It keeps mangling them, giving me no confidence that I can edit a document without destroying it.
25. My company just migrated to the version (5.x.x), which took away the wiki markup editor. After experimenting with the new page editor,  I am giving up. Editing existing pages and adding is major pain. Inability to see content in its native format is another drawback.
26. when I edit a "Content by Label" macro, the labels applied are missing from the macro parameters. Meaning that I have NO WAY of knowing, aside from my best guess, what labels were used to generate lists of content.
27. In general, I find editing any pages that were converted over from 3.5 and included any use of macros is incredibly frustrating and a waste of my time. (Editing nested macros? Replacing an image in a page? UGH.)
28. Removing the Wiki Markup Editor from Confluence,..is like Linux removing the command line interface,...can you imagine the uproar
29. Trying to modify macros, and ESPECIALLY nested macros is a JOKE (read: impossible) without the wiki markup editor.
30. We thought going from 4.1 to 5.x would be an improvement.... and we were half right and fully wrong. Some 4.1 bugs were fixed, and a whole slew of serious new bugs bit us directly on the sensitive parts.
31. I miss the wiki editor.
32. The ability to view the source of a page, select a section, copy it,..and paste to a new page. This was so easy to do with the WME,..and it is now impossible now in the latest version of Confluence. What used to take 2 seconds is impossible.
33. The ability to quickly create a table via WME using the | symbols,....and the top row using ||,....again ridiculous that I MUST now use their table creation button,...or type {table  only to have it pop open a box asking which of the useless tables I want to use.
34. The ability to view the source of someone's page as an example,..only to see deeply nested tables that are super ridiculous to understand.
35. selection in the editor is still super buggy when you begin to have macros, and even when you manage to think you have the selection you wan't it ends up copying more than what you thought you had selected... On top of that it is far harder to hit the right selection in the "View Source" than the actual editor.
36. when you view the source of a complex page,..and only want to copy and paste a small section,...it can be next to impossible to find that section.and,...Ctrl-F WILL NOT work in that window
37. modifying a complex page,..meaning removing a small section was so easy and lightning fast with the Wiki Markup Editor,...however,....in it's present state,...if I try to do that,...I usually end of breaking sections or the entire page because I've modified or accidentally removed more than I wanted.
38. You also don't seem to be able to insert a picture within a table,....something that used to work.
39. you can no longer trust that you can find many types of things within Confluence pages any more when you need to to global revisions and global search and replaces. The basic Search box no longer finds everything, especially specific macros with specific parameters, or links that include syntax pointing to a target page in a different space. And it used to be that you could at least open up pages and use Ctrl-F within the wiki syntax of the page to find such things, but no more!

    I posted JIRA bugs on all this stuff more nearly 18 months ago, shortly after the move to 4.x, and I've seen no resolution of such bugs yet.

40. cutting and pasting in the Wiki Markup Editor was for every user:
    • Fast
    • Easy
    • Simple

    Now,...it's:

    • Slow
    • Complex
    • Confusing

41. Most were not given a choice to upgrade to the next version. And, once they were upgraded,..they took their grief out on the local Network Operations team that performed the upgrade. It happened here at this company. So, of the hundreds in this location, most has resigned themselves after complaining and misdirecting their grief. They ARE NOT happy users,...only beaten down and resigned to use what is forced upon them.

42. have you also seen the age of some of the issues that are opened and still unassigned?? Have you seen the number of votes on these issues, and yet they languish?
43. Just wish they add the Wiki Markup Editor back. I'm not asking for them to remove any other feature, nor make any other change,...just want the WME back......and NO, the RTE CANNOT do all things for all people.
44. This bug was filed 18 months ago, describing the most "broken" aspect of the new RTE editor in exhausting detail. The workflow that this bug describes is one of the most common tasks in writing wiki content. 18 months, and the only action they've taken on it is to keep pushing back the fix version further and further. Or taking off the fix version entirely, just stranding the bug in the middle of no where. CONF-24760 - Copy and Paste problems with list and macro selections. ( Open)
45. Every functional test detailed in CONF-24760 (reported in 4.1) still fails today in 5.2. 18 months later.
46. Here's just one of the functional tests reported in that bug ticket that you can reproduce for yourself in 5 minutes to see why so many of us bitterly complain about the RTE editor even now, nearly 2 years after its introduction. THIS was a task that was dirt easy and intuitive with Wiki Markup in 3.5 and earlier. Now? It's maddening to work with any sort of page that comprises anything more complex than a simple set of headings and paragraphs.
47. Macros in macros are far more difficult to select in the Source View because they are "clammed" together.
48. Then there is the matter of "When do I have the macro selected, and when do I not have it selected"... This part is not obvious in the Source View nor the Editor.
49. you keep power-packing the RTE with new features that only brings new bugs as well?
50. the Page Layout thing, the overhaul in the design, workbox, likes and even freaking image borders was more important for Atlassian than fixing issues with the RTE.

and to: John Masson [Atlassian]

Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap. You rock. (to the Anonymous above)

I want to specifically highlight the PDF issues mentioned in that list, too (Shannon Greywalker here again). The ONE thing that has kept us on Confluence 3.5.x all this time, and that keeps me here exhorting Atlassian to do the right thing, is that I have not found a single Wiki engine (yet) that does a multi-page PDF export as cleanly as your 3.5.x release does it. Even if you were to magically fix the RTE to solve the issues with everyday mainstream editing (as summarized well in the above list), I still would not give the greenlight to an upgrade until the multi-page export to PDF in 5.x or 6.x, lol, worked at least as well as in 3.5.x.

It is critically important to a LOT of shops that you be able to produce clean, professional multipage PDF exports of wiki content. CRITICAL. IMO, you should spend the next 6 months fixing the PDF export issues with 5.x and fixing the RTE issues with 5.x and just not roll out any new features. You have no idea how much word of mouth from long-time Confluence users who were formerly evangelists (not any more, quite the opposite) are affecting your revenue. I think the community would cheer if you said "no new features for a while: we're going to put our noses to the grindstone and go bug-hunting for a while."

For what it's worth, I still bump into a bunch of RTE bugs that I logged in 2011 when I go about my daily editing. Most of them are still issues, including the following which I retested today with Firefox 23.0.1 against Confluence 5.1.5.

• CONF-24118 (it was marked as "Cannot repro". The top part is fixed, but I can still reproduce the bug listed with the "different sequence of operations" bit at the bottom)
• CONF-24119 (there is still some sort of extra, invisible character between the superscript and non-superscript text that requires you to use the arrow keys twice to step over)
• CONF-24292 (still broken - but now adds an extra bullet too)
• CONF-24293 (marked as not a bug–I guess I can understand Atlassian's position, although this now means that WYS in the editor is not WYG. What if I want to leave an empty bullet to indicate that a list isn't done? Also, this impacts any list anywhere in the page, not just those at the end of the document.)

I just now filed a new one:

• CONF-30497 (for an editor issue that has been bugging me for months)

...but I admit that having a non-public background project for doing the real development work certainly tempers my enthusiasm for filing new issues. Assuming that this is expected to continue, is there any chance of getting some sort of automated process set up (like with remote issue links and some fancy scripting) so that the public issue tracker can be kept in sync with the real development status?

Otherwise, it's difficult for stakeholders to know where things stand. If a publicly-filed issue was fixed in the private issue tracker, but it never had its public status updated, and it then gets re-broken in a subsequent release, nobody will be the wiser and the poor issue reporter will think that his/her issue was simply ignored.

No direct response regarding the concise list of issues!

and let's not get distracted gentlemen,....the heart of the issue is the removal of the wiki markup editor.

In my honest opinion,..if the WME was left in the product,..I don't believe more than 1/2 the issues described above would even be a concern. Why,....because almost no one would be using the RTE at all.

I can just see everyone reading this and shaking their heads up and down in total agreement.

P.S. I can see that even the assertion that the Capcha has been fixed, is a fairy tale. I'm on my 5th word now.

No direct response regarding the concise list of issues!

and let's not get distracted gentlemen,....the heart of the issue is the removal of the wiki markup editor.

In my honest opinion,..if the WME was left in the product,..I don't believe more than 1/2 the issues described above would even be a concern. Why,....because almost no one would be using the RTE at all.

I can just see everyone reading this and shaking their heads up and down in total agreement.

P.S. I can see that even the assertion that the Capcha has been fixed, is a fairy tale. I'm on my 5th word now.

now, it's seven tries

Shannon and all:

We upgraded to v4.x in May of 2012. (And have been on 5.1 for several months, and just went to 5.2.3)

We continue to live in severe pain from the lack of wiki functionality.

I can tell you: The pain does NOT go away. In certain areas it gets worse over time. We make heavy use of wiki sections in documents that keep wikitext in place. Many of us no longer take notes in atlassian and use text editors instead (and then we drop it into a wiki text block in confluence). There are many other pain points.

Atlassian is unable to absorb the huge impact this has on customers, and insists on rejustifying themselves over and over. Part of how they do this is to say "hey, lots of people like it!"

We aren't arguing with that.

We are saying: Atlassian, figure out a path to the benefit that does not impose pain on users who used to love you.

We all want to keep loving Atlassian. But after an experience like this, Atlassian can no longer be trusted as a company (why adopt and depend on a feature from Atlassian that they are so willing to yank?). (We rejected hipchat purely because it is an atlassian product, and we don't feel we can trust Atlassian to look out for our interests.)

I've raised another bug against confluence for copy and paste issues within the editor resulting in a difference between what the editor shows and the final markup of the page (there now appears to be hidden macros that I can't see in the editor).

If I was able to change the source I could fix this myself (and I'd have been copying and pasting source between pages so it wouldn't have happened in the first place). But I can't.

CONF-30674 - Getting issue details... STATUS

We're yet another large organisation dissatisfied with the inability to change pages through the source - sure, for most users, for most of the time, the rich text editor mostly works fine, but when you hit a corner case, you're absolutely stuffed, far more so than ever before.

Paul Curren:

"Moving to a single editor has provided us -

• massive improvement in feature development velocity,
• an increased range of features we can consider implementing (e.g. we would never have implemented Page Layouts if we had to support wiki markup and round-tripping between formats, nor task lists)"

Ahhh,..the old "development velocity" excuse. As with all measuring and reporting tools,..they can be tweaked or "adjusted" to be whatever the management team is looking for as an example that their team is doing their job.

A great example fro this article: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/measuring-hyper-productivity

"Roy Morien added that it is very difficult to measure personal or team productivity mathematically. Hence, instead of trying to achieve the measurement part, teams should focus on delivering useful, working software and try to improve on what they did in the last sprint.

On similar lines, Adam Sroka mentioned that instead of wasting time in measuring productivity effectively and analyzing whether the teams have reached the hyper-productive state, teams should focus on the following

1. Are we delivering working software that is valuable – continuously, every iteration?
2. Are we expending effort in a manner which is sustainable? Can we continue to deliver at this pace indefinitely? Can we improve?
3. Are we wasting effort on things which do not contribute directly to the delivery of value? How do we eliminate such waste?"

Paul: Are you really going to tell us that you believe the Page Layouts was something to mention as a "shining star" example of something useful added to the product since the WME was yanked!?!?!?! You must be kidding right? The Page Layouts are a complete waste of time! No one here uses them,...and they actually asked if there was a way to disable that from showing up since it waste people's time.

and again,...you try to explain away the people who ARE complaining and asking for the WME to be brought back by stating that we are the 1%ers. How ignorant! I am grateful to Shannon for calling you out on this!!! Reread her response to your comment!

I'd also counter your confidence that you seem to believe you have a 99% approval rate, by takign a hard look at this thread. As Shannon stated,...this is buried in the 4.x area,...AND YET,....I see new people finding this thread,..and posting their comments. Perhaps you think that all those anonymous posts are from the same person,....how sad if you did.

And to your assertion that (and I'll paraphrase) "our developers simply couldn't keep maintaining two different formats, RTE and WME". OH Please! Give it a break already,...as the other poster above stated,...if you had left the Wiki Markup Editor in,....all these complaints and issues would go away.

By the way,..just because you get no feedback for the large majority of Confluence users DOES NOT mean they are content happy campers.

I can't wait until slashdot, or one of the many other blogs pick this debacle up and run with the story. Maybe then you'll understand just how unsatisfied the vast majority really are.

Here's some responses to, what was supposed to be a positive article, about Confluence:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3929935

We (25 people company) use Confluence, and we all truly hate it. The design is attrocious. It's ugly beyond the pinnacle of ugliness. We tried to use some custom styling to ease the pain, but Confluence uses so many badly designed elements that we had to capitulate.

---------

If this incredibly crappy product sells itself, then it's only because there is nothing better. If you don't know what your next company should do - please consider creating a better corporate wiki. Confluence is truly an abomination.

-----

Amen. Last time I used it, it was a mess beyond belief. Code intermingling with presentation layer. Dependencies upon dependencies. A case study of bad software engineering.

-----

They recently removed wiki formatting from their wiki in JIRA. If you want to edit a page you have to use their in-browser rich-text editor.

This (on top of a bunch of other friction I have with JIRA) makes it clear to me that JIRA is not a product they're building for hackers. It must be for program managers, or for check writers at enterprise companies.

-----

So Paul: How much more googling do we have to show you before you get it! My prediction is that the Wik Markup Editor WILL be restored into the product.

on my 7th captcha now

Appears Slashdot is covering this story: http://slashdot.org/submission/2941791/atlassians-confluence-debacle-and-the-fallout-from-users

I'd suggest giving the story a +

I'd also suggest post to twitter and facebook and any other media venue.

I love how JoshL tries to shift the focus away from the validity of the customer's arguments by claiming, "well, this must be Atlassian's competitor". Hmmmm,..what's the matter hitting a little close to home.

I read the article,...and I think it's spot on! JoshL: Instead of accusing all "anonymous" posters as "working for the other side", why don't you try to refute each point made. It's also very easy for us to accuse you of being someone that works for Atlassian, or of having close personal interests, say a spouse or family member that works for them.

samjones6: You hit the nail on the head! We as customers, pay the salaries of this company. We have the right to ask for something we've found useful and which makes us productive when using Confluence. We also have the right to complain when things are broken, especially when the replacement tool is horrible and full of bugs.

As a software professional myself, we would never remove one tool and replace with another and make the customers accept it cold turkey. We would introduce the new tool and then once the honeymoon was over,..say 2 releases later, only then would we deprecate the old tool.

The route Atlassian took,...essentially makes us, the customer, their Quality Assurance team. You can't tell me that the Real Time Editor was fully tested that:

• it provided the same functionality that the WME provided
• it has no High Severity bugs before shipment
• it was regression tested
• it was sanity tested
• it was unit tested
• it was customer focus group tested

I bet there's someone on the Atlassian QA team that threw up their arms when they started testing the RTE as the WME editors replacement. I bet they were extremely frustrated and wanted to sound off that this was a stupid move. I know, because I've worked for a few software companies that did the same thing, and I was that QA Tester wondering for the Product Manager was that decided to do something this stupid. and yes, I sucked it up and did my job, and got my paycheck, and heard customers complaining just like everyone here is doing. That is until I left that company once I found a better one.

A good company doesn't mind criticism or complaints. That is how they listen to their customers so they can make the product better. The changes they make are not for themselves, it's for the customers. After all, they use the product. So when representatives say that they needed to make the job of the developers easy, but at the same time penalize the customer by removing a critical functional tool, well, that is something that SHOULD enrage every customer.

and yes, I sign this Anon, I have that option, and I use it.

As Shannon stated, it's more of a pain to sign in, and then the captcha doesn't even work correctly.

Good comment http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4186895&cid=44817843

Well Ladies and Gents: We are another company that just upgraded from 3.x to 5.x and are in the midst of an avalanche of complaints over the missing wiki markup editor. You might ask, didn't they test this out and notify the masses. Yes and yes. The reasoning was that atlassian was no longer going to support 3.x, but especially for the supposed security updates. I am one of the sheep that came in on monday and found the upgrade version now in place. I'm confused by the new templates. Are they supposed to actually help us do our jobs? Not only are they confusing, but they stuff the new pages with things that need to be stripped out before it can be used. You waste more time doing that than creating a new page from scratch. One of the biggest complaints has been "where is the wiki editor". I'm not talking about a few people. I mean better than 90% had been using that exclusively. All these complaints fell on deaf ears with our upgrade team. Their job was to perform the successful upgrade. So then who can we turn to with these complaints. It took me days to find any type information regarding what other companies have done after this upgrade. Then I found this thread, and a few other blogs where people are or have experienced the same pain. I spent all of last night reading this thread as well as the other blogs. I have already sent an e-mail to let every here know about this thread. My conclusion, I am shocked, but at the same time, I thought this was a joke. I could not believe atlassians stance and remarks to their customers. How do you remove such a critical tool that we use every day to be productive when using the product. Every day since monday, people here have either stopped using confluence, or they are trying to use the new tool and only end up breaking the existing pages. We used to have 100's of new pages created every day. Since monday, only 10 new pages have been created. From what I have been reading last night, it seems that we are not alone in our misery. I am hoping that someone at atlassian can talk some sense and they can see this from our point of view. I wish they would send a rep out to see first hand the anger and utter frustration.

Wiki Markup is the reason we found a wiki useful for in the first place.

Now that wiki markup is gone from confluence, let's consider the alternatives:

For WYSIWYG editing, well, pretty much any word processor (word/google docs/whatever) beats the sh*t out of confluence.

For raw source editing of HTML/XHTML/XML, well, pretty much any editor (sublime/vi/emacs/whatever) beats the sh*t out of confluence.

At this point, i can only see two possible outcomes from this:

1) Atlassian faces up to the fact that they made a bad decision, listens to their users and re-introduces WME, even if it means there has to be extra work done behind the scenes.

or...

2) Users like me will find another wiki that does what we need it to, and we will never, ever, ever again consider an atlassian product again because we know we will be burnt.

I have now waited almost three years for the first to happen, my hopes are not high.

There's still these issues which were never addressed, besides the removal of the Wiki Markup Editor:

1. macros take the entire horizontal width
2. Edit/Remove popup. It covers my text while I am typing. I am forced to insert a bunch of white space to move it to the bottom of the screen. It is particularly annoying for me because of my extensive use of "numbered heading" blocks on pages that I edit- that means that all my pages are in a block, and so I see the edit/remove popup all the time.
3. The new RTE is just to time consuming for me. I document in wiki markup, then transfer it to confluence, which works okay as long I don't ever have to edit that page again. If I do I am in for many a counter-productive minute struggling to not click in the wrong macro and muck it up. Undo does weird things at times and back spacing reeks havoc with bullet points, it's not a well polished product.
4. Backspacing is a complete nightmare
5. CONF-28561 - Confluence Page Layout goes FUBAR ( Open)
6. What people don't realize was is that they will lose much more time fighting with an buggy RTE than learning a simple Wiki syntax.
7. What would serve them well was if they allowed an "Bring back the Wiki markup" issue to stay open, and every-time people complained they said "Go Vote for it"... That would reveal just which camp was bigger.
8. But what really bugs me allot is that they seem to spend allot of effort in putting new features in rather than actually resolving the bugs that has existed since 4.0 first arrived... Even the JIRA Team has is holding back on bringing in the new editor as they don't seem to see it as being mature: JRA-8943 - WYSIWYG / Rich Text Editor ( Open) ... And what does that say about it?
9. Confluence has a habit of getting in my way though and making me spend hours fixing broken pages...

10. This has got to be the most worst company for actually listening to their customers. Just check out how many bugs are either; quashed, deferred, closed and blamed on a 3rd-Party issue or out an out, just plain ignored.

11. If you attempt to do much customizing, it is extremely difficult to troubleshoot and fix - macros take up too much of the vertical space making it very difficult to look at a lot of content on one page.
12. we need it for much more complex tables, formatting, and image control to create the documents we started using confluence for.  Now, we are forced to attach as word documents and lose the collaboration and reuse capabilities that a wiki can provide
13. The fact that you replaced vs added as another editing option is what seems to have been infuriating folks.
14. It was much easier in the WME to control any types of formatting (font/style/weight/color), especially in tables; RTE is limited in the options provided.  Once you start to have an issue with formatting, especially in table content, it's nearly impossible to clear.  We have issues where we have copied content from one page to another and strange formatting comes across that is not in the original page.
15. There are several bugs introduced in the PDF export that affect how tables and text display and wrap, table content, and image location.
16. Trying to position text to the exact position that we want is very difficult in the RTE because so much vertical real estate is applied to the begin and end tags.
17. We have issues where extra spaces get added between punctuation marks.  It's difficult to compress the vertical real estate and ensure you have the specific number of breaks between lines - the macros tend to input additional blank lines that we don't want.
18. I try using the shortcut keys, but they are often ignored - in WME, I didn't have to worry about my h3, h4, or — being ignored.  Macros didn't just refuse to display when I inserted them - in the RTE, I can type these and they are treated as literal text or paragraph style, and macros you just input don't disappear.   It didn't take me multiple clicks to open a macro editor to change the properties.
19. upgraded from Confluence v3 to v5,....there has been an immense uproar by everyone here. The common consensus is that Confluence is absolutely impossible to use now! The templates are of no use,..and the loss of the wiki markup editor has caused all of the stir.
20. simple autocomplete for bullet lists do not seem to work consistently
21. If only you could give all those other neat features without breaking the original native wiki syntax.
22. there is no chance in hell that we'll be moving to 5.x any time soon. Not with the RTE and the PDF exports in the current buggy, clunky state it's in today.
23. They simply can't understand just how important the wiki markup editor was!!! The wme was all that me and my colleagues used every day. Put simply, the new editor sucks! It is HORRIBLE!
24. The "rich" text editor is not good enough to do the job on its own. It is buggy. Tables are a pain. It keeps mangling them, giving me no confidence that I can edit a document without destroying it.
25. My company just migrated to the version (5.x.x), which took away the wiki markup editor. After experimenting with the new page editor,  I am giving up. Editing existing pages and adding is major pain. Inability to see content in its native format is another drawback.
26. when I edit a "Content by Label" macro, the labels applied are missing from the macro parameters. Meaning that I have NO WAY of knowing, aside from my best guess, what labels were used to generate lists of content.
27. In general, I find editing any pages that were converted over from 3.5 and included any use of macros is incredibly frustrating and a waste of my time. (Editing nested macros? Replacing an image in a page? UGH.)
28. Removing the Wiki Markup Editor from Confluence,..is like Linux removing the command line interface,...can you imagine the uproar
29. Trying to modify macros, and ESPECIALLY nested macros is a JOKE (read: impossible) without the wiki markup editor.
30. We thought going from 4.1 to 5.x would be an improvement.... and we were half right and fully wrong. Some 4.1 bugs were fixed, and a whole slew of serious new bugs bit us directly on the sensitive parts.
31. I miss the wiki editor.
32. The ability to view the source of a page, select a section, copy it,..and paste to a new page. This was so easy to do with the WME,..and it is now impossible now in the latest version of Confluence. What used to take 2 seconds is impossible.
33. The ability to quickly create a table via WME using the | symbols,....and the top row using ||,....again ridiculous that I MUST now use their table creation button,...or type {table  only to have it pop open a box asking which of the useless tables I want to use.
34. The ability to view the source of someone's page as an example,..only to see deeply nested tables that are super ridiculous to understand.
35. selection in the editor is still super buggy when you begin to have macros, and even when you manage to think you have the selection you wan't it ends up copying more than what you thought you had selected... On top of that it is far harder to hit the right selection in the "View Source" than the actual editor.
36. when you view the source of a complex page,..and only want to copy and paste a small section,...it can be next to impossible to find that section.and,...Ctrl-F WILL NOT work in that window
37. modifying a complex page,..meaning removing a small section was so easy and lightning fast with the Wiki Markup Editor,...however,....in it's present state,...if I try to do that,...I usually end of breaking sections or the entire page because I've modified or accidentally removed more than I wanted.
38. You also don't seem to be able to insert a picture within a table,....something that used to work.
39. you can no longer trust that you can find many types of things within Confluence pages any more when you need to to global revisions and global search and replaces. The basic Search box no longer finds everything, especially specific macros with specific parameters, or links that include syntax pointing to a target page in a different space. And it used to be that you could at least open up pages and use Ctrl-F within the wiki syntax of the page to find such things, but no more!

    I posted JIRA bugs on all this stuff more nearly 18 months ago, shortly after the move to 4.x, and I've seen no resolution of such bugs yet.

40. cutting and pasting in the Wiki Markup Editor was for every user:
    • Fast
    • Easy
    • Simple

    Now,...it's:

    • Slow
    • Complex
    • Confusing

41. Most were not given a choice to upgrade to the next version. And, once they were upgraded,..they took their grief out on the local Network Operations team that performed the upgrade. It happened here at this company. So, of the hundreds in this location, most has resigned themselves after complaining and misdirecting their grief. They ARE NOT happy users,...only beaten down and resigned to use what is forced upon them.

42. have you also seen the age of some of the issues that are opened and still unassigned?? Have you seen the number of votes on these issues, and yet they languish?
43. Just wish they add the Wiki Markup Editor back. I'm not asking for them to remove any other feature, nor make any other change,...just want the WME back......and NO, the RTE CANNOT do all things for all people.
44. This bug was filed 18 months ago, describing the most "broken" aspect of the new RTE editor in exhausting detail. The workflow that this bug describes is one of the most common tasks in writing wiki content. 18 months, and the only action they've taken on it is to keep pushing back the fix version further and further. Or taking off the fix version entirely, just stranding the bug in the middle of no where. CONF-24760 - Copy and Paste problems with list and macro selections. ( Open)
45. Every functional test detailed in CONF-24760 (reported in 4.1) still fails today in 5.2. 18 months later.
46. Here's just one of the functional tests reported in that bug ticket that you can reproduce for yourself in 5 minutes to see why so many of us bitterly complain about the RTE editor even now, nearly 2 years after its introduction. THIS was a task that was dirt easy and intuitive with Wiki Markup in 3.5 and earlier. Now? It's maddening to work with any sort of page that comprises anything more complex than a simple set of headings and paragraphs.
47. Macros in macros are far more difficult to select in the Source View because they are "clammed" together.
48. Then there is the matter of "When do I have the macro selected, and when do I not have it selected"... This part is not obvious in the Source View nor the Editor.
49. you keep power-packing the RTE with new features that only brings new bugs as well?
50. the Page Layout thing, the overhaul in the design, workbox, likes and even freaking image borders was more important for Atlassian than fixing issues with the RTE.

Tables are a common issues and I continue to be frustrated by them...I've been working with several pages utilizing the feature and it really ruins my day.  Here's my latest:

We had a page where several tables were created, each with their own headers.  After doing so, we wanted the information to appear in alphabetical order.  Remember, each section has 1 heading and 1 table.  To move the heading and the table to a new location (in Firefox), in wiki markup it was:

1. Highlight the text to move
2. Cut
3. Scroll and Position cursor to the new location; although, because the content takes minimal space, you may not even have to scroll
4. Paste

In the current RTE it is:

1. Highlight table to move (challenging in itself to highlight the full table).  Can only do the table as you cannot highlight anything outside of the table like the header.
2. Cut
3. Scroll and Position cursor for table.  Because macros take so much space (we have section, expand, include, column macros in almost every page, you have to scroll quite a ways usually to get to the location that you want)
4. Paste
5. Scroll back to the original table location as the actual table remain - the content was cut and created a new table - the actual table itself doesn't move
6. Select the table
7. Delete
   
   1. You may have to actually repeat trying to select and delete the table; often, once you have done this a few times, it stops working. So you have to:
      1. Save
      2. Edit
      3. Locate where you were at
      4. Try again
8. Select the header text
9. Cut
10. Scroll and Position cursor for the header text
11. Paste
12. Remove the additional line it creates between the header text and table
13. Go back to the header that you actually removed the header and text from and delete the additional lines that still remain because the content was really never cut and the associated space removed due to the table left behind.

Now, increase these steps by several if that header text or table were in a macro such as a column or expand because you have to usually cut and paste those separately because often you cannot highlight the full content.

So, 13 vs 4 steps - doesn't seem very efficient.  And, when I have to move several tables in one page, this is very significant in terms of time and frustration.

Please don't say to use the source editor either.  Because of all the tags that are put in there make it difficult to locate only the information you need to cut/paste without breaking any other layout/formatting and, with everything on one line, it's difficult to read.

I am really annoyed by the removal of the WME editor as well. Basically, I'm just inserting everything as wiki markup and using containers to make sure they stay that way, since it's a lot easier to go back and edit or copy/paste the markup. The markup is much more feature rich, easily manipulated, and allows for more powerful document creation. If you want to keep the markup on your document, you can do so by enclosing everything within a container. The drawback is for some stupid reason if you choose to Preview then the RTE will reformat your wiki markup inside the container, breaking your markup. So I never use Preview anymore, only Save and then go back to edit fixes.

Hurray,.....

We just got the go-ahead to run trials on other wiki solutions as a replacement for Confluence.

Everyone here got so fed up that management decided, it was time to switch to a real wiki that still uses a wiki markup editor. When the e-mail went out, notifying everyone to be patient for a few more weeks as they run the trials and make their final decision, everyone started clapping,...it was awesome.

I wish the best for everyone else here. Perhaps your companies will also hear the outcry and respond in kind.

Bev

We've just upgraded to Confluence 4 and I am dismayed that the mark-up editing has been taken away.

Previously, it was the only way to fix issues in pages brought in by the RichText editor. Now we don't have that option. I wouldn't mind, but the RTE just does not work properly. I've only used it to edit one page so far, but the formatting is totally broken - similar items with the same heading level come out formatted differently- some with bigger fonts and bolder and "paragraph" text ending up bigger and bold. This just makes the pages look ugly - especially because this gets copied to the TOC (sub-items larger than headers).

I wasted about an hour the other day fixing up entries that somebody had made, come back today and somebody else's changes need fixing, so that's going to be more wasted time.

If you are going to force people to use a real-time editor, it needs to work properly for common things. I do not care about inserting a junit report or a task list, I just want simple editing - numbered lists, TOC, block text and the ability to insert images. To be honest that's about it, but this simple stuff just doesn't work! I am going to recommend that we downgrade to the previous version or find another tool that "just works".

Bad news.

More than 2 years after the release that removed the Wiki Markup Editor, and was replaced by the Real Time Editor, and people are still unhappy, complaints still come in and Atlassian has yet to admit they made a mistake. This doesn't seem like it will go away anytime soon, and I think it's only a matter of time before they give us back the WME (leave the RTE in the product if you want,..it's a piece of crap anyway).

Either that, or another vendor sees these complaints as a goldmine and launches their own customer friendly corporate wiki with a Wiki Markup Editor. One way or the other, time will tell.

Atlassian: Time is running out. You have customers that found Confluence to be adequate to use because of the WME. If you bring back the WME, all will be forgiven. However, the longer this festers, the less forgiving customers will be, even if you listen to reason.

There's no shame in admitting you're wrong. There is shame if you ignore customers.

We're already seeing similar complaints about the removal of the WME on Reddit, on Slashdot, on Twitter, on forums as well as on blogs. Snowballing.....................

New here, and I've read the whole thread, but can I ask how you're expected to manipulate the source, or a page directly with Wiki Markup?

As one person had said, it gets impossible to modify a page, especially with columns or with numbering bullets. We have a lot of grief going on here and it isn't getting better.

Can I also ask, why are the people that try to defend Atlasssian by dismissing complaints as either invalid, or making you feel like you're too stupid to use an awesome tool unless you use the Wiki Markup Editor.

I also agree that the product mgmt should have stood up for the customers/users even if it meant that the developers had to do more work. Besides, they're excuse that it was too hard for them is rubbish.

aha, now I understand what a captcha failure is

sorry,...meant to say:

"New here, and I've read the whole thread, but can I ask how you're expected to manipulate the source, or a page directly without Wiki Markup?"

Excellent article that explains the anger over the removal of the Wiki Markup Editor:

http://eikonal.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/intentional-loss-of-functionality/

The removal of the ability to use wiki markup seems to be a cop out.  The fact I am no longer able to quickly and reliably create an article formatted how i want is a huge step backwards.

It is pretentious to think Atlassian knows best.  The fact an article is needed to justify removal is a strong indication removing it was a big mistake.

Finally, due to this blunder that is being made worse by Atlassian continually trying to justify it, I no longer recommend Confluence.  Your agile abilities are being replaced with the big company mentality - some lame manager made this decision and the underlings are forced to go along with it.

Two Three examples why the removal of wiki markup is inefficient.

This comment is one - so two was changed to three.

An extra line was added above this (h4) comment even though one was not wanted.

Unable to use other editors, such as Excel, to quickly create and generate tables.

Something that took seconds to do, now takes many minutes.  After the long process of using the What You See Is NOT What You Get editor (note the additional lines that are being added to his comment by the editor - I am leaving them to stress the point), the formatting wars begin.  My nice, clean consistent articles are now getting whacked by the poor text editor.  Previously, Excel (which is the king of table editing) could be used to create the table i wanted, then simple Excel macros would crank out perfectly formatted wiki markup.  No mas.

The rich editor is What You See Might Be What You Get.

Formatting is hell.  I'll indent a line, and suddenly three sections below where I am editing is indented.  I'm unaware until much later, then the formatting wars between what I want and what Confluence thinks I should have, begin.

I am rather disappointed with the Poor Text Editor.  Atlassian's arrogance and inability to admit the mistake is the worse part about this debacle.  Instead of cajoling their customers to approve of their product, they should be looking for ways to address their concerns.  The options for addressing the concerns appear to be:

1. Help customers downgrade to a version that provides wiki markup and is supported.
2. Provide a plug-in.
3. Add wiki markup to current and future versions.

I've read number 2 is available for beta but have not tried it.  The potential problem with this solution is that it will not help with page formatting issues unless all pages are converted to content that is contained within that macro.  It may work, especially if Atlassian provides a way to bulk convert pages to content contained within the macro.

Finally, discussing replacement products on this page is unfair and unprofessional. Other members of Atlassian's dwindling raving fans base are encouraged to show respect to what was once a great company.  Hopefully Atlassian will return to greatness by learning the valuable lesson about understanding your customers (who are not always right) is more important than listening to investors' greedy desires to accumulate more (short term) wealth.

Jens, I hesitate to mention this - it is, frankly, risible - but you might be interested in some IE-specific CSS I've described in a comment on CONF-25942 - Getting issue details... STATUS . In IE, it shows the word "Selected" in the title bar of selected macros. I would not describe this as a "solution"; it is, at best, a stop-gap if you really need it, and you're using IE (I tested it in IE9).

None of my users use IE, and I suspect on this thread there may be zero IE users....  I suspect none of us would have a problem if atlassian said "avoid IE"

Well now that's just silly. Just because you and your team don't use IE, doesn't mean the world follows suite.

Not supporting IE and Firefox (and probably Chrome) at a minimum is downright stupid. I'll give you that specific versions could be sunset,...but the major browsers and latest versions should be supported and that includes IE.

Besides, if Atlassian doesn't support a specific browser, they'll just tell you that that's value-added software.

Where's the WME?? Seriously.

This rte is impossible to use and modify existing pages.

I wonder how Bev is doing on her company's transition to another Wiki?

I wish she would have said which one she turned to since I am also looking for a Confluence replacement. Does anyone know Bev? If so, can you point her my way.

When we are upgrading from Confluence wiki 3.x to 4.x/5.x, the wiki markup to xhtml conversion is not working well, especially for pages with nested macro / html codes / scripts etc, resulted in many formatting issues and user complaints.. is that a known bug in Confluence upgrade / code conversion process?  This is a big issue and have very bad user impacts.  Any workarounds that anyone may have?

samjones6 or other community members.. how about the "Wiki plugin for Confluence", have anyone used that and can that be used as an option to preserve the more complicated macro codes / scripts that we have in wiki 3.x and avoid the large number of formatting issues after migrated to 4.x/5.x?

Another Happy Customer! NOT!!!

RTE Sucks

Wow, just wow.

Our company just upgraded over the weekend, and we are now without the wiki markup editor. Staff here are in an uproar, not only because the wiki markup editor is gone, but they're also confused by the real time editor and making changes to existing and new pages. With the rte, every change causes mass churn and more work than as if you created the page from scratch.

Wish I had found this page before the upgrade. It would have made the difference and we probably wouldn't have upgraded. My goodness, so many customers complaining about the loss of the wme, but Atlassian still turns a deaf ear. ?????

Our company barely uses Confluence anymore (hosted) – the "new" editor will never be as fast as the original WME and our programmers will never like it, period.  They can update it all they like, but until we get an option to use a pure WME, we won't be recommending it (just the opposite) to anyone.

When writing in a bullet list, on any bullet line do the following:
1) <Shift> + <enter>
2) type the character -
3) Hit space bar

and the bullet list will terminate.

Is this expected behaviour? 

ha
wtf

How stupid is this? I can directly enter markup but I can't edit what I have entered. So if I make a mistake or if your editor makes a mistake and say adds or removes lines or spaces within a macro I can't simply remove the spaces. No I have to endlessly drag and drop bits the bits and pieces which overlap and push each other out of the way or delete themselves or otherwise mess up what would have been faster to edit as raw text. This process actually cost me both time and work. I had to revert the page to regain the lost work and then I had to redo the work I couldn't recover. How do you expect me to maintain a wiki if every time I touch it I run the risk of losing hours of work and will likely have to restore and restart the process several times? Your lame excuse for removing the editor is the most shortsighted poorly conceived marketing bullshit I have ever read. Anyone asking me if this is a good fit for their wiki needs will get a resounding NO. Find something else. Anything else! Using Confluence for a wiki page is like designing a website with word. Stupid, error prone, foolhardy, a waste of your time and money and the wrong F*cking tool for the Job.

Hi Sam: If Atlassian screwed up the RTE so bad that even a 3rd-Party addon offers no help,...what choice do users have at this point? We are experiencing the "invisible formatting" you mention and it is killing us.

The new editor is not ready for Production use. It still can't take acceptable 3.5 wiki markup and render it properly in the new RTE.

Double Bar Does Not Create TH

Here is an example:
Wiki markup of:

|| | |

should result in a table with two columns the first being a TH and the section being a TD. What actually comes out is this:

If you are  interested, I did not put the words 'first cell' in there.

Numbered Lists With Bullets

Let's have a look at those bullet lists again. This time, we'll see if we can use wiki markup to create a numbered list with bullet points. I use these all the time. 

Here is the code in wiki markup:

# Parents
* Father 
* Mother
# Siblings
* Sister
* Brother
# Other
* Cousins
* Aunts
* Uncles

and here is what it looks like when inserted using the wiki markup mode:

1. Parents

• Father
• Mother

1. Siblings

• Sister
• Brother

1. Other

• Cousins
• Aunts
• Uncles

 We'll call that an epic fail and move on.

Delete before and the Image goes in the table not after it

Create a table. Move cursor down to next line. Insert an image. Put cursor on left side of the image. Hit backspace. 
The image is moved inside the last row of the table where it should be outside the table to the right.

Where Are The Invisible Objects and Guidelines

A lesson learned from Dreamweaver and the like is that when coding you can align your code to visualise where the invisible objects and code blocks are. When using a graphical user interface the objects and blocks are invisible so the editor needs to provide some clues. Dreamweaver, Microsoft Word and other WYSIPWYG editors have this so why doesn't Confluence? A button to show and hide hidden objects and show markup would be very useful. 

Microsoft word is a good example of this.

There are lots of reasons why WYSIWYG editors are a bad idea or poor solution at best. Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. If this silliness must continue then at least do something like introducing a dual pane that shows in real time the page preview.

If anyone has pointers on a replacement product for Confluence then we are listening.
SharePoint: Has separated 'sites' and a similar group security to Confluence. It is an awkward step backward to HTML style editing with folders instead of single page links within a space. RTE and code editing for pages.

Next? 

I just found that the editor is doing something completely unexpected. I have just spent the day bashing my head against the wall. Good luck actually getting work done. Tools - View Storage Format shows the xhtml markup. Perhaps Atlassian could add a Edit Storage Format option to edit the markup directly. Add a verify button so the user can check their code before saving.

The new editor reduces Confluence down to its competition. I can no longer say that it is better than sharepoint or any other wiki.

Creating a page with the new editor is taking a lot more saves than previously. I used to be able to construct a whole wiki page from the WME and now it is taking several edits. If I saw someone do this in 3.5 I'd be telling them to use preview! It may be me getting the hang of this new editing experience but so far I am finding that there is no good work flow.

Previous comments have related to 'round tripping'. I can tell you that this is not a problem for most cases. Once people learn wiki markup they only ever go back when what they are doing is either too hard or complicated in wiki markup. Killing wiki markup due to 'round trip errors' is a cop out. We teach people to edit pages in one or the other and never switch between them - and if you do then clean it up before saving. If that is the problem here then kill the ability to save pages marked up or write a better parser for loading markup into the rich text editor.

Meanwhile, in Chrome Ctrl-Shift-V is the key combination for paste special text only. This function is seriously needed when using the new editor as in many cases the previous formatting is not required. Unfortunately Ctrl-Shift-V does not work in the new editor. It just does not work. There is a workaround: right-click then paste as plain text. Awful I know but still it is slightly better than pasting into the url bar, copying out the result, then pasting into the editor (which is what I have been doing for a long time) 

Hey, what do you know. It looks like they fixed the Captcha. Perhaps there's hope that they'll also fix Confluence by adding the wiki markup editor back! Obviously Captcha was broken, and similarly, Confluence is also broken.

Sure, you could have let customers hit the Save button 10 times and enter a new captcha each time, and then argued that it was a feature intended to make sure the submitter really wanted to post the comment.

In like-wise fashion, stop telling us that you actually helped US by removing the WME. Add the WME back into Confluence!

Riddle me this batman: wiki markup used to be very portable - you could code anywhere any paste it in and it would work - but now there is no code that can be copied and pasted between confluence editor sessions just something on the clipboard - so how can code be copied from one place to another

this question is asked due to the extreme annoyance of losing changes when a page does not save any there is no place to store it while you wait to see if your recent changes will be saved or if you are going to spend yet more time doing the page over again

we are already discussing going back to media-wiki - sorry the dont like the rte

The ability to insert macros by typing { and waiting is quite good. I question though why {Table of Content Zone} appears above {Table of Contents}. 

Unsure about anyone else but I never use Table of Contents Zone. Actually, I don't know what it is. When I want a TOC, which is on most pages, I hit { type to then enter.. and get a Table of Contents Zone macro.

I can see that the macros are alphabetical order. Is there a way to not show TOC Zone? Or move it to be after TOC so that the key combination {to ENTER inserts a {TOC} ?

It's almost 2014, I'm still irritated by this change (throwing developers & technical users under the bus for the benefit of managers etc.), as apparently are many other people.  I was a big time confluence booster before you went and took away the tool that made editing easy & enjoyable for programmers.  I'll admit using the RTE has become less painful over time, but I'd still jump ship to another product in a second if it provided the WM editing like Confluence Classic.

Anyway I found this article when searching for a notepad++ syntax file for confluence flavored wiki markup.  Can you create/release/maintain such a one please (for NPP, Vim, & Sublimetext/Textmate ideally)?  Now that this is the only way to create/edit wikimarkup for confluence for users like those in this thread that don't want to use an RTE, it would be a nice gesture.

I've just used the Confluence 5.1 editor in Firefox on Windows 7 to annotate the planned outline for a new document. I formatted the outline as nested lists, using different colors to highlight various types of information. Some headings are preceded by icons:

• Heading (comment about this heading)
  • Another heading (another comment)
• Another heading (another comment)

Atlassian, I invite you to try the same; some formatting at the start of a list item, some (or none) in the middle, and some (different from the start) at the end. Clearing unwanted formatting (yes, I'm aware of the "Clear Formatting" button in the toolbar) - just the unwanted formatting - can be maddening, especially at the start of a list item. Perhaps I just need to work on my Confluence editor-specific fu. I use many other editors to do similar tasks; none has as many quirks as the Confluence editor.

If you don't see problems immediately (I suspect you're not trying), let me know, and I will try to get the time to step through some of the issues that I am observing, one key press at a time.

Nit (more or less inconsequential, as far as I'm concerned, but worth mentioning briefly): when Confluence inserts color formatting, it uses decimal color values, whereas, when I copy'n'paste formatted text from one location in a Confluence topic to another location in the same topic, the color values are in hex (a browser/platform clipboard-specific thing, perhaps?).

Independent of these editor usage issues: how I miss the ability (in other "HTML-based" editors) to assign class attribute values that refer to my own CSS.

OK, a wiki without wiki markup is an oxymoron. 

That being said, if you want a usable text editor, you need to do certain things:

1. Formatting after the fact.  Say I have a section copied from a plain text editor that I want to now format.  I to be able to
   1. Highlight a line of text
   2. Click on the text format dropdown or whatever
   3. Apply the selected format to the selected text, and the selected text only
2. Drag and drop.  I used to be able to drag text within the editor, or from other windows.  Even basic text editors can do this in a windowed environment. None of your products have this except Jira, which now mangles diffs.
3. Cursor tracking.  I really have a hard time finding my cursor in the window unless I'm actively typing.  Makes it hard to paste my wiki markup in the right place.

If you want people to stop complaining about your wiki without wiki markup, you need to have your rich text editor at least as capable as Mac's TextEdit for handling rich text markup.  Otherwise it is like pulling teeth to use.

Now it's clear that power users - the one that literally propelled your company into a success story - are not the users you care for.

Even considering that this wiki engine is not free, that it requires Tomcat and lots of patience to run, I use to be happy to sell all the benefits of the product. That changed drastically.

Removing the WME is a mistake.

Refusing to admit it’s a mistake is a bigger mistake.

Stubbornly forcing your weak reasoning behind it all to your hard core users is an insult and displays arrogance on your part.

I don’t know who runs the client experience at Atlassian but that person fails to understand the very basis of being in business…if your customers are not happy, they will not come back.

The fact that your CEO has to “explain” the decision should have ringed some bells. That’s just like when Steve Ballmer had to “explain” why Vista was a good product and that customers just didn’t get it.

Anybody at Atlassian ever wondered “what kind of market position are we losing by going that way?”

The answer: mostly powerusers, mostly software developpers.

It’s kinda funny that your flagship product – Jira – is aimed at that exact market as well.

Don’t you see how Atlassian is now antagonising a big part of its Jira clients by removing a feature in Confluence?

That’s a text book definition of shooting yourself in the foot...with a twelve gauge.

Atlassian use to be innovative and use to lead partners in innovative path. Now you’ve joined the ranks of Microsoft (with its silly “ribbon” concept in Office) and EA (for most of its product lines). You are just a big software company that will force feed its clients with a product they don’t like.

The Confluence text editor tends to give me big problems when I try to format just a certain selection of characters. Sometimes it double spaces, sometimes it single spaces. When I try to italisize/bullet/number/task just one line, it will often italisize/bullet/number/task the lines above and/or below.

Is there a trick I am missing? 

So, here we are in September 2014 and people still hate the "new" editor. We only recently upgraded from 3.5x, and only because of the security issues in the old version that Atlassian refused to fix after discontinuing support.

I have tried to keep an open mind about the editor. It's not as bad as I expected, but it's annoying enough to keep me irritated and ranting about it.

There are some positives: Taking the time to learn the weird new shortcuts can combat some of the pain .. eg where I used to hit enter and just start typing at the top of a document (where the 1st paragraph was always an h2 heading) to create a paragraph above, now I also have to hit ctrl-0 to remove the unwanted formatting.  It's only 2 keystrokes (I keep telling myself).  If I can remember the full syntax of an old macro, I can just type it in without waiting for the dialog to pop up.

But there are lots of twiddly negatives, such as trying to "escape" an opening square bracket. It leaves a slash in front: eg \[  unless you backspace and delete the \ and then forward over it. And then there are the major negatives, like the dialog box with the Edit button that hovers over the macro widget and, ironically, prevents you from editing what's underneath.

We stayed with Confluence because of the volume of documentation that was already in it and the effort it would take to move onto another platform. If it were up to me, and we were starting fresh today, I would go with XWiki. Sorry, Atlassian. I used to love Confluence, but now it's just another annoying tool.