For accountability and traceability, Admins need the ability to set "Publish with comment" as default or make it required.

Please create an issue to track this! Thanks.

Thank you, Atlassian! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/The-ability-to-add-version-comments-is-BACK-in-Confluence-Cloud/ba-p/1464221

This functionality is essential to document version tracking. 
I have been pushing people in may company to add comment on what has changed in articles before publishing them so we have a better tracking of changes.
Why/how could someone decide to remove this functionality in the new version?

Sai, thank you for the update! I am very happy to hear how close this is to rollout!

Wonderful news, thank you.

Hello Everybody, 

Thank you for your patience (and humor) as we built this feature. I’m here to report that we’ve been building and testing this feature internally and it is now ready for primetime. We plan to roll this feature out in a phased manner starting next week (August 31st). You should be getting this feature on your Confluence instance in the next 2-3 weeks. Here’s a community post that explains what this feature will look like in the new editor - https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/The-ability-to-add-version-comments-is-BACK-in-Confluence-Cloud/ba-p/1464221

@Darren 

The hotel party idea is great

As someone mentioned above, there is no way Atlassian don't have comments on internally, there would be a riot.

Sorry for my unsubscribe email reply guys. I just found the "Stop watching" command. I had been looking for the watch "eye" icon earlier so I didn't find it earlier. 

That's probably what Atlassian have done too.

I wondered why so few watch this thread compared to those who voted for it... its presumably as all they see is chatter about why confluence has done nothing since June so stop watching.... like I'm about to.

Dammit, now I have Edwin Starr as an earworm:

"Jira feedback forms, huh, yeah
What are they good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again..."

I like Darren's idea- we can all wear masks that have one of the following designs:

• Atlassian logo next to the phrase CONFCLOUD-6595
• A picture of the What's Changed box with the words: "What did you change?"  NOTHING" 

I'm going to book us all a hotel. I was thinking it would be nice to have some sort of "CONFCLOUD-65695 10 Year Reunion Party" where we can get together and reminisce about the old times, when we were naive enough to think that paying for a service gave us any sort of say in how it might work, or even have our views listened to by the people who were happy to take our money and do - well, I'm not really sure...

Love the optimism Anne!

Is there an update to this feature? 

Hi Sai,

It's been six weeks since your last update. When can we expect an update on getting this feature parity in the new editor?

Is this still due in 2020? So many basic features of an editor have been deprecated in the new version, but somehow I bet that the amount we pay for it has not been similarly deprecated. The way that Atlassian treats paying customers is just astonishing - it's a constant process of pulling the rug from under our feet.

Hope this will be completed soon - I just a bunch of time trying to find where the comment box was when updating a page just to find it's not there  

Please add this back!! 

@sai - seriously?  You have all these people who want to use this feature and now there is less of it than before? Please explain. 

Also, can you give us an update of where things are since your status update of June 20?  And is there any possibility this issue could move out of "gathering information?"  Surely by now you have gathered enough information to fill the Oxford English Dictionary!

@sai: we do not use the new editor (because it's a regression) but we discovered today the "Feed" page do not report the "what did you change" information anymore. We use this a lot to know what others did quickly rather than asking them or viewing the page history or even opening the page and comparing the current version with the previous version (this is waste of time). We need this back asap.

@sai: Thank you for the update.  We will all be much happier then this feature is restored, and your life will probably be calmer as well!

Thank you for your interest and patience with this request. I can confirm that we are going to be introducing this feature (permanently) in the new editor. We are going to start working on this in the next few weeks. We will make sure we keep the status of this ticket updated and give you a rough ETA when we have one.

So, let's no bother ASKING anyone if they WANT it "better", let's just slow the restoration process to allow the keyboard monkeys who screwed up the editor in the first place, make additional bad decisions...

Atlassian is crumbling under the weight of success.  I have sen this before so many times.  Remember Hayes modems?   Remember Digital Research?  Remember MCI?  Remember Lotus?  Should I go on?

@Kim Hirschman: I commented on the most recent "What's New in Confluence Cloud" post asking about this request (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-June-2020-Edition). I got a response fro Tracy at Atlassian that said, "We have heard the feedback and understand how important that capability is.  Rather than just duplicating how we did it before, we are working to make it better.  The details are firming up, and we'll update you as ASAP."

Here's hoping!

I just went to the Confluence Cloud Editor Roadmap (https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap/) and it looks as if the "What did you change?" comment box has moved from "Gathering Interest" to "Short Term."

I don't know when this change was made, or even whether "Short Term" means that its restoration is imminent or it will reappear for a short period of time and then go away again.  If the former, why wouldn't Atlassian let us know?  Oh well - fingers crossed...  

That this critical functionality is still "gathering interest" makes me suspect one of these explanations:

• Adding the feature would be significantly difficult/expensive
• Adding the feature would wreck someone's ideal for their new UI layout
• Adding the feature would undermine a decision to force those with technical requirements to migrate from Cloud
• Adding the feature serves a customer demographic (technical publications) that Atlassian no longer targets

I would feel better if I could believe the first explanation, but it seems trivial: exposing one existing text field. The other options leave me cold.

I am a big fan of Confluence, but without this feature I can no longer say honestly that this is the best tool to use for writing specifications. Usually when a change was made on a feature I just wrote in the change request the link to the Jira feature. If someone needs to know why the specification has changed, this link provided everything he needed to know.
Please bring this feature back !!!

i struggle to understand why this is nearly 18months old and still not prioritised.  I used to use the old version and had foolishly assumed it was still there - not going down well when i demo confluence to people. 

Please restore this function. Quite surprised that this is removed. One of the really useful functions in Confluence allowing people to specify in a nutshell what changed.

Please bring the feature back.

How can you in your right state of mind remove such an important documentation control function? To tease, you even leave the "Comment" column in the page history. This change basically made my management ask me to look into Confluence alternatives ASAP once they realised this was gone in the new layout (yesterday). They are even considering moving our docs back into Word!! (as if that would solve the issue ).

It took me more than one year to convince them to use Confluence for documentation management, this is making all that effort go to waste.

It's hard to believe this feature has been removed. What's next? You going to remove the change history entirely?

Seriously folks, next time you get the urge to "redevelop" your user interface, you might want to spare a thought for your customers.

We have people in our organisation who still today refuse to work on content in Confluence since the removal of wiki markup editing - the WYSIWYG editor is just too much work for serious content editing.

Please restore this feature.

Still waiting for this feature to be added to the new editor. Seems crazy (and really bad UX) to show the change comments in the page history, and yet you can no longer add them!!

(Even the ability to add a comment in the page history where there isn't one would be better than the current state.)

8e30e3f3bc6d You can keep on using the old editor (TinyMCE) without needing to clone a page created with it. For details please see:

• https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/learn-about-confluence-cloud-editing-improvements/
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/Change-to-your-content-is-in-your-hands/ba-p/1324476

Specifically:

The legacy editor template can be enabled for your site at any time.

Most sites currently have the legacy editor template enabled. If your site falls within the small percentage of sites that do not, please reach out to Support for more information about enabling the legacy template.

Yep- we're still cloning a page from the old editor whenever we need to start a new page.   The DNA of that one page will be perpetuated forever...

Hey Confluence people, how's it going with this ticket? It's been open for more than a year now, would be nice to get some further update!

We need this feature and if possible to have it mandatory before a change is committed. 

They have offices globally. Just go to the nearest on the same day. Agree...will need to be after lockdown!

Not to mention the difficulties in getting where their offices are...

They neither listen, nor ask for guidance on major changes that disrupt the way we work.  Let's ee, a coupla thousand people standing 6' apart, we could take over the town...

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.

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.

This is such essential functionality, a page may have hundreds of edits.  Is this really so hard to add?

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.