Confluence 8.1 Release Notes
14 February 2023
We're excited to present Confluence 8.1.Highlights
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Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.
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Express yourself with new emojis
For: DATA CENTER SERVER
We have over 3000 reasons for you to smile with a new suite of emojis in Confluence 8.1. Access all the emojis you’ve come to expect online, and give your team more ways to engage, react, and express themselves across their pages, blogs, and comments. Sometimes a 
is all you need.
See our Symbols, emojis and special characters page for emoji tips and tricks.
We have even more emoji upgrades planned in future releases, including the ability to add your own emojis and additional admin settings to manage these uploads.
Screenshots (left to right): see your frequently used emojis in the emoji menu; a skin tone selector is now available; browse through popular emoji categories at the top of the emoji menu.
Improvements to attachment storage
Confluence 8.1 contains significant improvements to attachment data storage, which will see benefits for Enterprise scalability, performance, and user experience. Here’s a snapshot of the changes:
Move pages without breaking or losing attachments
For: DATA CENTER SERVER
Sometimes attachments break or go missing during failed page moves. To tackle this issue and improve page move performance we’ve developed a new and more robust way of storing attachment data. Best of all, this solution will restore all previously “lost” attachments from failed page moves.
On startup of Confluence 8.1, we’ll migrate your data to our new v4 attachment storage structure. Confluence is expected to work normally while this migration task is running in the background.
Learn more about v4 or the migration task at Hierarchical Attachments File System.
Store your attachments on Amazon S3 object storage
For: DATA CENTER
You can now store attachments on Amazon S3 object storage. If your team has a large or increasing data footprint, we recommend this optimized attachment storage method to help you efficiently scale in the future.
For existing customers that will need to migrate their attachments from an existing storage method, see Attachment Storage Configuration.
For new customers, see Configuring S3 object storage.
New database metrics via JMX monitoring and log file
For: DATA CENTER SERVER
Access new database connectivity and HTTP connection metrics through JMX monitoring for efficient in-product diagnostics and timely resolution of performance issues.
The metrics are available through JMX, as well as the new log file atlassian-confluence-ipd-monitoring.log which can be found in the <local-home>/logs directory.
To use these metrics, you must have first enabled JMX monitoring.
Learn more about this feature at Live Monitoring Using the JMX Interface.
New log for Cloud migration data
For: DATA CENTER SERVER
Want to track your Cloud migration progress? Find a dedicated migration log at atlassian-confluence-migrations.log. We haven’t made any changes to the main application log atlassian.confluence.log, which will still contain copies of the migration log files.
We suspect this will be a time-saver, so we’ll be backporting this feature to Confluence LTS versions from 7.13.14 and 7.19.6 onwards.
See Working with Confluence Logs to learn how to access our logs.
Accessibility improvements for low-vision and keyboard-only users
For: DATA CENTER SERVER
This release contains more accessibility fixes for our screen reader and keyboard-only cohort to improve their experience and ability to perform basic tasks on Confluence. Here we’ve highlighted some fixes you can expect:
- We’ve removed unnecessary repetition of table headings when using VoiceOver.
- We’ve added keyboard support for the Status macro toolbar in the editor to enable the full functionality of this toolbar for keyboard-only users.
- Screen readers will announce the list of macro suggestions activated by the shortcut "
{" in the editor, and when you navigate the list with the up and down arrow keys the selected item will be in focus. - On the Advanced Search page, autocomplete suggestions in the “Contributor” and “In space” input fields will be announced in the correct and logical order, and when you navigate the list with the up and down arrow keys the selected item will be in focus.
Check out the full list of fixed issues
Resolved issues
For full details of bugs fixed and suggestions resolved, head to our public issues tracker on Jira.
Get ready to upgrade
Before you upgrade, check out the Confluence 8.1 Upgrade Notes for important changes in this release, then follow the usual upgrade instructions to upgrade your site.
Been a while since your last upgrade? Check out our upgrade matrix for a bird's-eye view of the most important changes since Confluence 7.19 LTS.
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Credits
Our wonderful customers...
You play an important role in making Confluence better. Thanks to everyone who participated in interviews with us, made suggestions, voted, and reported bugs!