Clearly Confluence are not listening. If they were then maybe they would comment in this thread.

Only way forward is to stage a rally on this topic outside their offices. Think we have enough people now to do so.

Who is with me?

Given that more and more people are clamoring for the return of this feature, I don't know how much more interest Atlassian needs to gather (see status above.)  PLEASE let's get this scheduled!

Please bring this back!!

+1 on the Compliance issue. Would like this back please.

Hi Confluence team,

Having this feature was a crucial factor for us to choose confluence as it's mandatory for our company from a compliance perspective.

Please bring it back.

Add it back please.

Pleas bring it back...

Atlassian inserts a comment when converting an old page to the new editor using the offered function.
Atlassian writes into the comment "Version published after converting to the new editor". 

This is very helpful. Why should this be denied to us users?
Another question: isn't there a developer out there who can implement a small addon and offer it for free on the Marketplace?

Add it back.

Please restore this functionality.

How difficult is it to bring such a small feature back? You guys need scrum training!

Put feature back 

Yes, please put this feature back. 

+1

@Avinoam, @Sunny,

After almost 200 comments and ~400 votes is there more interest to gather?

Losing this feature is pushing me towards abandoning Confluence for a git-based wiki.

Atlassian's propensity to unceremoniously DROP useful and valuable features is unacceptable.  When will they learn that they cannot just hack up working systems and dispense with stuff they consider inconvenient for them?

From my multi-year history watching - Never.

This feature was very useful to track changes in documentation.  Please restore

My team uses this feature to support our quality processes.

Another voice to support restoration, for the reasons mentioned. Although edit summaries are often unnecessary, certain environments and certain issues need them a lot more than others do. 

My team leverages this feature to provide historical organizational context around why changes are rapidly being made by everyone on the team in a fast paced remote working environment to facilitate shared understanding where meetings are few and far between in a Lean style 🧠

I've posted to this issue before, but I want to say that I am grateful for the steady stream of new comments all reinforcing the need for this essential feature.  

Please bring back the comment box. It is a crucial feature for our compliance program to keep track of what has changed in the documents.

I echo a lot of the above comments. I am aghast at its removal! It is essential to us on a small subset of our pages in order to comply with our quality standards and see which changes to compare against.  Please tell me it is coming back soon and, if so, when, it is coming back in order that I don't have to switch our company to a different wiki.

– https://getsupport.atlassian.com/browse/JST-569470

As ISM for Eagle Genomics, I am reinforcing the request to reinstate the comments box when publishing a page. This is a vital feature when updating information security documentation - essential to explain changes during internal and external audits of our ISO27001 certification to our auditors.

Would really appreciate the feature returning in a future version. Meantime we have to continue using the old version and advise all users NOT TO CONVERT.

Guys, you gotta be kidding. Are you aware of the fact that

• A proper versioning tool is more than a document history
• Your implementation is very minimal for this use
• The comment functionality is the one little piece on top of the history to make it usable
• Industrial companies with a certification for quality management (e.g. ISO) highly depend on that?

This is not a nice to have thing! For us, it is a No-Go to use with a big part of our documentation. I assume this is the case for most users in industry.

This seems to be a collective industry-wide madness.  Another cloud-based Wiki I used suddenly deprecated loads of features because they wanted to make it mobile-friendly and many features were really hard to implement in a mobile interface.  In addition all the buttons suddenly became enormous and information density substantially decreased.   I just don't believe that primary user of a power-wiki is using it via a mobile interface.

@Andrew Pearce, Beautifully said, and I have expressed the same complaint on behalf of my company and hundreds of users for not just this, but many, many features we have relied on over the years that are gone in the new editor. My valuable time! The fact that we, the Confluence users, are supposed to take the time to micromanage the status of bringing back features, for which we originally bought the product, is a slap in the face!

Please add the publish comment feature back ASAP. It is more than incompetence to remove it - it shows absolute disregard for the professional teams who wish to track and manage page updates. Any other system that manages versions of resources absolutely requires a comment to be added on change. To remove the option because some users don't use it is stunningly disappointing. 

I spent much time two years ago encouraging the adoption of Confluence for all the documentation and design resources in the company. Now I am frankly embarrassed by Confluence, especially with the new Editor. I will soon actively start looking for alternatives unless the Atlasssian team start being responsive to fixing the diabolical changes introduced in the past year.

I guess this feature was removed because they checked that stats and not many people were using it. Too bad that for the people who were using it, this feature is very important: we are a very regulated business and every change to a document must be documented as much as possible (the version comparison is very useful, of course, but that's not enough to explain WHY a change was made – maybe even with a link to a Jira ticket). We are actually wondering how to make that field mandatory, and all of a sudden it was ... gone.

Bring it back, please.

Hi @Avinoam - It's been over a month since you mentioned that the Atlassian team was looking into a "potential quick win" to bring this needed feature back.

People have been doggedly requesting this enhancement feature parity for OVER A YEAR. When will you be able to provide an update on this? 

This is an awful loss for the product. There is now no way to mark or pin a certain version of a page to a project milestone, without jumping through unacceptable hoops. File this one under "What the heck was Atlassian thinking?"

Completely agree with Wendy

Can't believe that 320 votes doesn't warrant advancing the status of this issue. The work around is to use the old editor, but that's VERY inconvenient when you've just finished editing a page created in the new editor.

This was a very useful feature and I am missing it on the new editor.

Hi rcouture1, I have left an internal note into your support ticket. The SE should get in touch with you soon to clarify and proceed.

However, in short:

• The possibility to use the old editor is still there for all the users that already had it (just choose to use the old template when creating a page)
• For new instances that do not have the old editor, customers can reach support to have it enabled 

Upon reaching out to support...

This is a process that can be done, to enable the legacy editor temporarily. However, I'd like to share with you a few things before going forward with the enabling of the legacy template:

• Currently pages created on New editor will be not converted to the legacy editor, it will remain in the new editor's format;
• We still don't have an ETA for the feature request to be implemented, however, enabling the legacy editor is a temporary process, the legacy editor will be available in your instance until 31st, March;
• After 31st, March, new pages will be created on new editor's format again;

804cc40ede4d 

Have you noticed the latest status update?

[...]
Thanks for all the feedback on this ticket. Given the amount of requests we've started to explore what a potential quick win may look like to re-introduce this. That being said, we still can't guarantee a time frame for this - we will make sure to update this ticket as we know more on our end.

In the meantime, if you have the legacy template available - which most of you should have - you can keep using that to create new pages and still keep using this feature. If you don't have that template, you can reach out to support and we'll be happy to enable it for you.
[...]

So I reverted a page to an old version today and it put the comment "Reverted from v. 8" in.  This is obviously very useful to have, but I don't understand the reasoning as to why it's useful here and not when doing normal page edits.  There is still a "Comment" column in Page History. 

26a613c6d4ea did you see the update from yesterday?

[...]
Thanks for all the feedback on this ticket. Given the amount of requests we've started to explore what a potential quick win may look like to re-introduce this. That being said, we still can't guarantee a time frame for this - we will make sure to update this ticket as we know more on our end.

In the meantime, if you have the legacy template available - which most of you should have - you can keep using that to create new pages and still keep using this feature. If you don't have that template, you can reach out to support and we'll be happy to enable it for you.
[...]

The only viable solution for Atlassian is to completely bring back the old editor.   I don't know why they felt the need to remove it, but whatever needs they have, removing the old editor was a disaster.   They should revert to the editor as it was and re-think whatever insanity made them think that the new editor was sufficient. 

Your competition is Google Docs.  Atlassian wins only because they support inter-document linking and google does not.   Throwing away everything that made Confluence good is the opposite of helpful.  I was the largest champion of Confluence at my company.  And even I have to use Google Docs now because the new editor is so uselessly bad.

This seems fairly obvious, but please please please do not remove key features that have been in products forever without thinking things through properly.  This is clearly critical to businesses as an audit trail, and is not a complicated piece of functionality.  Cloud server users are hostage: if I was administering a server instance then there is no way I would have upgraded with this regression.

Now to look at all the other regressions, such as the new autosizing image macro, which resizes small images into a huge blurry mess, and removed manual image sizing, link and border functionality.  

Hi Avinoam,

Thanks for the update. Can we take your comment to assume that the old editor will be available for the foreseeable future and that there isn't a planned date where all users will be forced to migrate all content or adopt the new editor as default? I'm hearing different things from different people and would like to see the official stance on the switchover.

Also, and you know I don't like to grumble, but even if this is a "quick win" for you, it's still been a year of work from the users to get you to consider including this feature.

Cheers,

Hi all,

Thanks for all the feedback on this ticket. Given the amount of requests we've started to explore what a potential quick win may look like to re-introduce this. That being said, we still can't guarantee a time frame for this - we will make sure to update this ticket as we know more on our end. 

In the meantime, if you have the legacy template available - which most of you should have - you can keep using that to create new pages and still keep using this feature. If you don't have that template, you can reach out to support and we'll be happy to enable it for you.

Thanks,

Avinoam

To echo Tom Crowley's comment, it's beyond frustrating that this functionality has been removed in Cloud while Atlassian's own tech writers/contributors see the value in continuing to use it.

Hello, I have a tried the alternative soluttion, to using API REST not is functional, is slow process and isn't functional; I need to show in my organization an option alternative the use "the comments" in new editor but your imagine to expose a my superiors that to use REST API is the best option.

In a ticket they indicated me the next:

I used the Postman tool to run API:
Workaround:

I selected Put method and payload *https://yourinstance.atlassian.net/wiki/rest/api/content/contentid* and
body:{
"id": "contentid",
"type": "page",
"title": "page title",
"space": { "key": "space key" },
"body": {
"storage": { "value": "<p>This is the updated text for the new page 3</p>", "representation": "storage" }
},
"version": { "number": 13, "message":"New CHANGE COMMENT" }
}
Note
In order for the above to work, you MUST supply a new title and the next version to be generated (thus, if you are up to version 2, change this to 3, and so on.) The Confluence title can be changed within the UI afterward.

I being very optimistic, the above it's ridiculous because suggest the change the body and tittle of the page.

And again, I hope don´t have to expose the use API REST to my superiors.

Best regards

Melissa.

Mentioned this a while ago, but your comment (Dan) reminded me why this issue bugs me so much: Atlassian use the comment feature in their own documentation updates.

They have removed a feature that their own colleagues (who are admittedly using Server with plugins) use. If they want use-cases for it, all they have to do is walk across the office and ask someone.

Agreed Kim!  And for Atlassian:  One of the reasons I love Confluence is the ability to notify/be notified when pages change, and for that notification to be missing any user-defined message makes that almost useless.  Sure it's great to get the notification and be able to look at the diff of what changed, but that requires effort to see what's changed.  With a user-defined change message it can be much more quickly determined whether I need to go look at the changes or not.

I would also like to make it a required field; however at the moment I would settle for just getting it back again as it used to be.  The data structure still supports it because you can see the comments you were lucky enough to be able to add before this feature was discontinued.   

@dan agreed. 

I'd actually appreciate an option to require that be filled out on a per-Space (or per-page if you want to get crazy) basis.  I bet some who use it for compliance agree, even though that's not my motivation.

Can you please bring this functionality back? We use it frequently on my project, and it saves heaps of time.

@Shari Clare And as you can see, Atlassian really care about fixing it...

@Shari Clare Nope. That column would only have displayed the text typed into the "What's Changed" comment box. While we don't have that, you can't comment on new editor pages.

Is there an easy way to make the Comment column on the Page History page editable? Currently, when using the new editor, that column is always blank.

This is exceptionally useful and one of the reasons for choosing Confluence over other tools or even Google Docs.

Dear Atlassian

I understand that you have a plan in place for firstly attending to "burning issues" with the new editor.

A few months ago, whilst the new editor was being introduced, users could create new pages with either a template from the old editor or the new one.

For our company, we would be happy to be able to use the old editor and have the "what's changed" functionality, whilst you guys are busy with other matters.

(My impression is that others here might also find this a suitable interim solution)

This has the added benefit of simplicity for Atlassian... presumably just updating a config file somewhere to enable the template for the old editor to be available.

Looking forward to your feedback about this idea.

Regards

Ronny

I'm adding my +1 here to the general outrage of most dedicated Atlassian cloud tool users.  I no longer expect any useful response much less meaningful action, but for the sake of being able to say with a clear conscience that "at least I tried," I'll make my argument here as on many other quietly closed and ignored tickets:

The general trend over many of the last updates forced through on Atlassian cloud services (Jira and Confluence especially) have indeed make the look of Atlassian products "prettier" and have followed the general tread in the SW designs throughout the industry of making more aesthetically simple, monochromatic GUIs despite the continued proof that having dedicated buttons instead of little '...' menus hidden in corners makes for a more efficient work experience .  The unfortunate reality when actually using the these tools is that the speed, easy of use, and stability (or even availability) of existing features has degraded with each increasingly toddler friendly simplification pushed through these updates.

The latest example highlighted by the 303 votes on this issue and it's linked duplicate issues is that editors can no longer give watchers on a page a quick, executive summary of changes to a confluence page which would otherwise require any watchers to spend a much longer period of time trudging through historical versions of the page and emails with overlapping strike through and highlighted change text littered through a fragmented view of the page in an email.  Who hear actually prefers to read through a word document with all markups overlaid on the original version instead of the final version with a little revision block explaining what changed between rev 1 and rev 2?... anyone?

ISO13485 compliant SW like QT9 and even non-iso compliant SW like SolidWorks PDM Vault include comment dialogues and even offer admins the options of requiring comments publishing new versions of documents because world wide regulatory bodies have recognized the need and function of version/revision comments as a simple way for anybody to understand why a design or document ended up the way it did.

Also along the lines of the trend (though not part of this ticket) are the following:

1.  Easily accessible buttons or comment fields have been hidden so that what was once easy (like assigning a Jira to a new user AND commenting to them why it's been given to them in one shot) are not buried in menus that aren't even labeled "more options" anymore.

2.  Generating a full page wide Confluence page is in it's death throws in favor of mobile friendly skinny page formats that ignore the trend of wider and larger monitors in every serious work space that uses Jira/Confluence/etc.  

3.  Simple, SIMPLE, editing activities like changing the title of a Confluence page require a user to refresh the page sometimes or than once.  Just trying to open a page for editing sometimes requires a refresh or two to just go through.(anyone else get the pop up from Confluence that "this page is taking longer than usual to load"?)

4. Despite the fact that there are less and less tools loaded with a page that are actually useful to the editor, Confluence and Jira load time continue to get longer and longer.  --> What exactly is loading?  Has anyone made an attempt to optimize the code at all or just made it look prettier?

I could go on, but the only folks still reading at this point are the people who are stuck experiencing these problems, not the folks causing these problems or theoretically trying to fix them.

I honestly have no idea how I got here. How do I check my history? Or if I'm being hacked? I swear I'm paranoid now smh

They're too busy editing the names of Product Managers out of our comments to care about actual feedback.

When anyone gets that same statement about how we can still use the Page History to do what we need to do, we need to point out that PAGE HISTORY IS ONLY USEFUL IF THE COMMENTS ARE THERE! This has now gone into an endless loop.

Guys, it looks like we are seeing the future and we are not it. 

@Remi You got that one too, huh? I was not impressed. This is what he got back:

Hi Dany,
 
I don't have permission to see the request I raised, so I can't remember what I said in it. Thanks for this wonderfully generic reply. I've seen the "burning areas" comment from at least three different Product Managers now. Which is ironic, because the Product Managers burned the areas. 
 
I've also been through the roadmap. In the name of "improvements", you removed 21 features and added seven new ones. (And they are only the features mentioned on the roadmap.)
 
I share my feedback regularly with the Product Managers. Too regularly. I have no confidence that it is being taken seriously, and no interest in my complaints bouncing off the deaf ears of the Confluence Cloud product team. I want the founders/CEOs to know that the rollout of the crap new editor is negatively affecting a lot of customers and is trampling all over the Atlassian company values. If you're not going to pass my feedback, and many other people's feedback, to Mike and Scott, what's the point in the Feedback to the Founders page?
 
We're not complaining about individual issues to them, it's the whole process. For the past year you've been throwing away any customer support and loyalty you had from your power users. Where is the accountability here? Will you look at trying to restore customer faith after you've dealt with some burning areas? Or should we raise a ticket?

@Remi they just don't get it. I find it quite difficult to comprehend that through the many explanations of that the issue is here they believe comparing previous versions is a solution. They know not what they do.  

Same here from Dany, stock answer : 

Hi Remi,

We appreciate the feedback shared. We’ve made sure to share this feedback directly with our Product Managers as we are tracking the impact that this has had on our customers.

We’ll revisit this proposal as soon as we get through some of the more burning areas that we’ve received for the new editor. To keep track of this feature, you may refer back to CONFCLOUD-65695 and our public editor roadmap.

Regarding Compliance, I do see that Sunny has made a comment on the ticket mentioned above and has provided that you are still able to use Page History and Compare Versions to provide more objective and reliable logs of what has been changed.

Thank you for sharing your feedback as we continue to make our products better.

Dany | Atlassian

Dear Sunny,

Re your update from February 3, 2020: How are we supposed to get the comments onto Page History if we don't have anywhere to enter them?

We need this back ASAP! please don't ruin your product....Gitlab seems to be everyday more and more better alternative for Atlassian suite.

Haha! No. I think the PMs just read through it at lunch and laugh at us.

Tom – Do you seriously believe that the "Feedback to the Founders" actually reaches anybody above a Product Manager....   Are you interested in this bridge that I have for sale?....

Avi isn't helpful at the best of times, least of all when he's pasting a stock answer and hijacking your feedback for the founders...

Yes- here is the response I got yesterday:

Hi Kim Hirschman!

 Thank you so much for sending over your feedback on this feature. My name is Avinoam and I'm a product manager on Confluence.

In our public editor roadmap here https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html you can see that our focus in the short/medium term is on bringing back some of the key documentation features like linking to an undefined page, linking text to an attachment, linking images etc. This doesn't mean we'll never bring back https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65695, just that we'll revisit it once we get through some of the more burning areas of feature gap feedback we've been getting for the new editor.

Thanks,

Avinoam

Here is what I wrote back:
Dear Avinoam Zelenko,
 
Thank you for your response.  It's good to know that someone is listening.
While it is a good thing that CONFCLOUD-65695 has advanced to the "gathering info" status, that is only slightly reassuring. We are still in the land of "we'll take another look sometime later."  What is your recommendation for getting our interest out where it can easily be gathered?   I'm sure that many people posting to CONFCLOUD-65695 will be happy to explain why the "what has changed" field is not just a "nice to have" but a requirement for our businesses. 
 
Meanwhile, have you considered allowing customers to return to the old editor?  I have been reading the "Switch to the Old Editor Possible?" question ( https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Switch-to-old-Editor-possible/qaq-p/1104580 ), which is not, by the way, "closed" in any sense of the word.   You could put a positive spin on this- think of it as "Confluence Classic."  
 
Best regards,
Kim Hirschman

I put a comment in the "contact the CEOs form" and I got a response from one of the product managers. It was the same copy/paste that Sunny used above. I pushed back and said that yes, I'd seen that copy/pasted response before and that my real concern was how the feature request had been treated by the product team. I received a response that said, "I can absolutely assure you that there's full internal visibility to all of these issues, and our response is as transparent and as honest as possible."

Has anyone gotten a different response?

@Ammar, was it actually the CEOs? Or just a different Product Manager? (I got burned and only got to a Product Manager, who didn't come good on his promises.)

Hi Sunny, 

Thanks for the update. But as an example of how change logs are harder to read than comment boxes, see the email I got telling me this ticket had been updated:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your feedback on bringing back the "What's Changed" comment box when publishing a page in the new editor. To set the right expectations and as a follow up update , we currently have no plans in our public editor roadmap here https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html you can see that our focus in the near short/medium term is on bringing back some of the key documentation features like linking to implement this suggestion in comparison with other feature requests an undefined page, linking text to an attachment, linking images etc .  

You are still able to use Page History and Compare Versions to provide more objective and reliable logs of what has been changed.

You can track our upcoming roadmap here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html. If We'll revisit this suggestion once we have any updated plans, get through some of the more burning areas of feature gap feedback we will update 've been getting for the thread here new editor . Thank you again for your feedback.

I got a response from the CEOs and it looks like they said they are looking into it

I am encouraged by the change in status of this issue to "gathering interest", per Sunny's update.  This is good as far as it goes but we need a timeline and we need to keep giving Atlassian more interest to gather.  Here is their social media info:

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/Atlassian/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/Confluence

There are a lot of people arguing for the option of returning to the old editor.  This page was interesting: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Switch-to-old-Editor-possible/qaq-p/1104580 .  It has been tagged as "solved" but no one knows why.  It is a very active page.

Re: Sunny's recent comment edit: "You are still able to use Page History and Compare Versions to provide more objective and reliable logs of what has been changed."

You're missing the point Sunny. I can view the page history, sure. I can Compare Versions, sure. But because you've removed the 'What's changed' box, you've taken away my ability to provide context to those changes.  That is an invaluable tool.

Done! Thanks Kim. 

Done ! thanks kim for the link

I just went to the page mentioned by Ronny Zulaikha to lodge a complaint with the founders of Atlassian.

https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

No one has managed yet to get a response from them but I would urge everyone who has posted here to contact them anyway.  

Can't believe this was removed, such a crucial part of maintaining a readable change log. Sometimes we edit huge pages with several tables on them that create these big, confusing change emails where it can be really hard to tell what's actually changed. Previously, a user could add a simple "fixed a typo" comment, but now, I guess they just do nothing, and everyone will be confused about what change they're actually looking for... 

I would add 100 votes to this if I could.

I tried twice, and never got a response from anyone with any authority to do anything.

I hope you get higher up the tree than I did!

Thanks Tom, I just lodged feedback to the founders on the link https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

I'm in Sydney, so time zone won't be a problem if they actually want to discuss.

Cheers

Ronny

The January one is here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-January-2020-Edition/ba-p/1265275/page/3#U1288311

I'm not sure how often anyone looks at these tickets. The "What's New in Confluence Cloud" pages on the Atlassian Community forum are being looked at by people from Atlassian (we know because they keep blocking people and editing comments), so even though we're getting no interaction (the Product Manager is more interested in liking half-sentence comments of vapid, meaningless praise like "Epic!"), they might take notice if enough people start kicking up a scene. 

It's possibly only marginally better than screaming into the void here, but feel free to come join the disgruntled masses on the forum. 

Hi Ronny, yeah, I used it last year. Left quite an, uh, 'blunt' message. The Product Manager for Images and Attachments responded and offered to set up a call with me to discuss my concerns and feed them back to the team. I said I'd listed all my concerns on the forum and was hoping to get them heard by the higher-ups. Also, I wasn't going to join a call at 5am or 10pm because he was in Australia.

He told me he'd get someone with a better time difference overlap to set up a call with me, and would contact me the following week to check that they had done so.

Needless to say, that was the last I heard from him. Did my feedback ever even make it to the founders? I doubt it.

Hey guys, just wondering if anyone has used the "Feedback for the Founders" facility on the web site?

https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

This issue was created on February 26, 2019.  That is 28 days from today. 

The definition for the "Not Being Considered" status is

"We appreciate the merit of this issue, but don't intend to work it in the foreseeable future. We'll review it again within a year to see if our decision has changed.  (emphasis mine)"

Can we at least get a commitment from Atlassian that they will comply with their own policies?

use Page History and Compare Versions to provide more objective and reliable logs

That's why all developer tools and code repositories don't have commit messages, and it's generally frowned upon by developers to write clear commit messages that explains the rationale for changes. Not.

You've clearly never had to audit old versions to track when, how, and why critical changes occurred in large bodies of mature documentation. Straight up diffs are not adequate for the task. 

If visual clutter was the problem, then redesign to make it less cluttering. Removing a useful and for-some critical feature because it's aesthetically displeasing is not flattering for your product design team, and makes your product feel like a toy, not a tool for professionals. 

I didn't know that you had removed this feature, but found out the hard way when the company made the ill-advised decision to switch to the new version of the Editor. 

The workaround offered is not feasible. A workaround would've been to be able to add a comment after a page was published and even that's not an option. This sounds more like a something that wasn't caught in regression testing. Please fix it. Thanks

So what you're saying here is that we had a feature; a feature that was valuable, a feature that we used, and now Atlassian is taking it away from us because ???

What was the thought process behind this? This comment box was immensely valuable when used with the Change Control macro. You've really dropped the ball here.

@Sunny,

Thanks for updating the description. As has been noted above, the roadmap has changed to "Gathering Interest" while this issue is still marked as "Not Being Considered." Aside from the contradiction of those statuses, the update still doesn't answer any of the questions about why this feature was taken away. It is certainly possible that the contradiction between status of this issue and the roadmap status is a mistake, but that still doesn't address the underlying questions about how this feature was selected for removal and whether or not we can continue to rely on this platform for our needs (which include change management). 

As much as I appreciate the curl workaround you mention, it's really no substitute. Aside from the ridiculous idea of replacing a 'no-click' feature (one that was integrated into the save process) with one that requires a significant amount of additional information to construct the command line, the basic idea of adding an annotation to the change is lost because the process creates a new change entry with a new title. 

This remains an issue that speaks to the specific product features, but also the process at Atlassian and the confidence that users can rely on the availability of  features that are important to them.

Echoing the frustration pointed out by @Erica Dragani -

On the roadmap page - "Will it be available?" indicates Gathering Interest, "Track the backlog" indicates Not Being Considered. Messages about the reality of this macro's future are inconsistent. 

Hi,

In our case we scheduled a meeting but they canceled it and no meeting was held with Avinoam.

@Sunny @Avinoam Zelenko
Casually noticing that none of the at tags are working

On the Road Map it says this issue is "Gathering Interest". Is it gathering interest or not being considered (as it's currently tagged on the ticket)? 

Like a lot of people here, I am very frustrated by the fact that Atlassian has NO INTEREST in looking more closely at this issue even though it will result in a number of customers abandoning Confluence.  We have gotten the same response from @sunny multiple times.  Doesn't Atlassian have any procedure in place for revisiting decisions?  And how many people who don't use this feature actually complained about how its very existence was making their lives more difficult?  I'm supposed to use it every time I edit a page and I keep forgetting, which suggests to me that if anything it was not prominent enough.

Has anyone tried the approach suggested by Melissa Espinosa about scheduling a meeting with Avinoam Zelenko?

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65695?focusedCommentId=2313574&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-2313574

In addition to the update about using the compare version being a replacement for comments (as people before has said IT'S NOT, try saying that to a programming team using versioning and see where it gets you), what's really irking me about this situation is that we're getting no information on WHY this issue is not being considered.

Is it for technical reasons? I find this near impossible to believe, as all they'd have to do is re-implement code they already had! If there's some back-end reason as to why it's impossible, AT LEAST GIVE US SOME INDICATION THAT THIS IS THE CASE.

Is it because they don't think there's demand for it? If the number of people voting and commenting on this issue isn't enough by Atlassian's standards (especially for the amount of work they'd have to do), then quite frankly those standards need to be rethought because I think this amount of feedback should be more than enough to motivate re-implementing this feature. What exactly would be required to sway you opinion?

Is it for aesthetic reasons? Was the interface not 'streamlined' enough before? Then just put an item under the ellipsis menu to "Publish with comment" (like you already have with "Publish without notifying watchers") - this would satisfy 99% percent of people in this thread, keep your interface "streamlined" and "modern", and have absolutely no impact on people who don't use this feature.

@Sunny, can you please give us more information on WHY this is not being considered? Because at the moment it's looking like the decision making process is management (not users, not the tech team, management) saying "We don't think this feature is useful, we don't care what our users are saying so we're not looking at it".

@Ronny I too would be interested in a suitable competitor product however they may not be best placed to ask. I do not believe they understand what a suitable alternative product would be as the basic failure to comprehend this issue and its impact is quite alarming.

@Sunny, @Avinoam

I don't mean to be rude, but do you guys actually use Confluence?

Have you never gone to a page history and wanted to first see a brief summary of each change? Do you actually "use Page History and Compare Versions", even if there are 50 or 100 revisions? Or do you use the REST-API as per the workaround? Seriously?

Many people here would understand if you stopped using Confluence and switched to a competitor product.

If you are unable to facilitate restoration of this feature, could you be so kind as to recommend a suitable competitor product.

(apologies for resorting to sarcasm)

@Paul, you're right there. They have repeatedly demonstrated that they do not.

@Tom Crowley unfortunately I don't think they care.