Issue replicated on CDOG using either table toolbar or going through mock wikimarkup

Here is the answer to my 01/Sep/10 3:37 AM post above, which I received by email on 10 September 2010 04:44 from Andrew Rallings:

Dear Hugh,

I am the VP of Support at Atlassian and Scott (one of our CEOs) has passed your email onto me.

Firstly thank you for taking the time to email us we really appreciate your feedback.

Over the last few months the Confluence team has been working hard and investing a significant amount of resources on making the editing experience more reliable. This, unfortunately, isn't an easy problem to solve given the nature of WYSIWYG editing in the web.
For this specific issue, we have made good progress on it and should have it resolved with the new Confluence 4.0 editor. This new editor is not due out for a while and our current estimates have it due around the first half of 2011. If you are interested in participating in early feedback you can join the Confluence User Taskforce by signing up here.

Regarding your comments on providing legendary service this is something we take very seriously and strive everyday to achieve even though we don't always get there. I do think we have done a number of things in the last year in the company which do reflect legendary service including increasing the size of our support teams by twice the rate of growth of the company, publicising our SLAs and developing Hercules our Support Robot to help answer your issues faster. We definitely do not rest on those achievements and continue to work every day to improve. I would be happy to talk to you further about this should you wish.

In regards to prioritising and fixing bugs it is a decision process involving a series of considerations including complexity of the fix, number of customer votes and criticality of the bug. Obviously we would love to fix all outstanding bugs but I would hope you understand that this isn't always possible. More details on how we approach choosing which bugs to fix can be found at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/Support/Atlassian+Bug+Fixing+Policy. Again I would be more than happy to talk with you by phone should you wish to discuss this further.

I hope this reply helps address the concerns you raised. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you need to discuss this further.

regards
Andrew

I notice too that since then there have been some posts above from Sherif Mansour [Atlassian].

At least we now know better what is happening, and there is an end in sight to this issue.

Added Atlassian Status to the description of this issue

I have sent the following message to the Atlassian's CEOs via http://www.atlassian.com/about/contact-atlassian-ceo.jsp

I raised a support request (https://support.atlassian.com/browse/CSP-50466) and have only been referred to a bug which has been listed as "Major" priority (http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-4435), but which has been around for 5 years!! This is just not acceptable, and I am not going to wait around patiently for years, as others have done, not to have this fixed.

I have added my vote and comments to get this bug fixed but clearly something is more broken: your customer care system. As I say in my comments on this: your so-called Legendary Service (http://www.atlassian.com/about/legendaryservice.jsp) is just not applying here.

I love your products, but on this issue something has gone wrong in your system and needs to be sorted out; this is no longer about a fix to a bug, it is about whether your management system works.

Thank you for your attention to this issue.

Legendary service it is not.

I read with distaste the page http://www.atlassian.com/about/legendaryservice.jsp

To quote:

What does Legendary Service really mean to us?
We are passionate, enthusiastic and obsessed with providing a legendary service experience to our clients. In today's insanely competitive marketplace, we realise that our fanaticism to listen to and support client needs is our key differentiating factor.

Legendary Service is not just a marketing slogan to us, it goes beyond mere customer satisfaction. To us it means striving to exceed customer expectations, creating total satisfaction and 'wowing the customer'. The greatest proportion of our new clients come as referrals from existing clients, which is something very pleasing to us.

As a customer-focused business, client happiness is our number one key success factor. Quite simply, we cannot exist without our customers — the greatest core asset our company has is its customer relationships.

It does not take much to see that this is just marketing. The reality is:

• My customer expectations are not exceeded; they are disappointed
• I am not totally satisfied; I am totally dissatisfied
• I am not 'wowed'; I am shocked

I spent ages trying to get things to work properly when I came across this issue; I raised the issue https://support.atlassian.com/browse/CSP-50466 which was referred as a duplicate of this. For me it is a continual pain, and there is no workaround. I am shocked to now read that the issue has been known about for 5 years. I too echo the earlier comments that this is unacceptable.

Like everyone else, I am gobsmacked that this issue has been around for 5 years. What sort of change management team do you have? It would be different if Confluence were free I guess, but come on guys, you charge for your software and this isn't rocket science. Add another set of double characters that break a list in a table. Sheesh... FIVE YEARS. Like one of the other commenters, I have also been trying to get Confluence established but we are now at a stage where the 'business' side will be using it and they will not accept something so 'buggy' as to not have even basic functionality and tables, lists, flexibility within those lists is CRITICAL. Others pushing Lotus Notes are winning because of your lack of progress.

I joined this group just so I could vote and watch this issue.

I couldn't believe it when I googled and found that this problem has been known for years.

As someone already said, this is basic functionality.

I have recently been promoting the usage of Confluence in our organization over another wiki
primarily based on ease of usage of formatting.

This problem makes table usage frustrating and weakens my case.

Yes, i would also like to know the status. It is a very annoying problem that we constantly have to work-around. Tables are such a basic function that I would expect to work.

Marie

What's the status of this bug? Still open after 5 years?