I may have found the root cause of the problem: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/australian-tech-company-atlassian-valued-at-35-billion-despite-having-no-sales-staff/story-fn5lic6c-1226879660894

If I was having that much fun, I'm not sure that I'd bother fixing bugs either.

K15t's Scroll PDF Exporter has a feature that lets me work around the issue for PDFs. I presume Scroll HTML Exporter will do the same for web help.

https://www.k15t.com/display/PDF/Uploading+Resources

Still looks terrible in Confluence itself, but unless Atlassian changes the licensing we're never going to use it as a web server for customer-facing docs anyway.

Why is this marked "resolved"? Our new logo is rectangular and it looks terrible in my PDF output. I tried the "quadratic" plug-in but it doesn't seem to help.

No Problem. It is just that "Sandler" is not a nice thing to say here in Bavaria - you could loosely translate it to "hobo".

I do beg your pardon, Mr Sander. I hate it when people change the way I spell MY name, I should be more careful.

Come to think of it, I hate it when people change my company logo, too.

kathleen I am not a Sandler.

Thank you @Martin Sandler. But, sadly, it still doesn't fix rectangular logos that are crushed into oblivion.

So well over 2 years since the insanity began, it's well and truly been forgotten. Martin, it's awesome that a third party has released a tiny-plug in for something that should never have been done to the main product in the first place. Those of us on OnDemand, we can just continue to suffer.... or migrate.

Nicklas, I suspect a large proportion of the 84% is also dissatisfied with the solution. The 16% is only the ones that didn't care that the logo is now round.

Wow! So 16% isn't happy at all! 16% of 40,000 companies. That's a whooping 6,400 companies, each with hundreds of employees. Dissatisfied.

Kathleen, didn't you read the official response? 84% of people would be happy with an editor to make square/rectangular logos fit within an unusable resolution with an uploader.

Happy birthday, unresolved issue. The space logos are still round, they still look stupidly squashed, people are still cross about it.

Well done, Atlassian. No wait, it IS resolved? I'm confused ... if it's resolved, why are the logos still round?

Chris, I actually tried to alert Atlassian's CEOs about this issue and several other, and outlined how this enterprise can no longer bet the future of their business on Atlassian's products. No response. Although it would have been comical if I'd got something back telling me to use CSS hacks.

If I were the CEO of Atlassian and I stumbled upon this “issue” and the way it has been handled thus far, I would not be happy.

I guess it’s a good thing for certain Atlassian personnel that I’m not the CEO of Atlassian.

But let's face it - this company have changed, and they will continue to change - and they will leave customer behind.

Very true, in fact they have left customers behind already. My disappointment is very real as well. Instead of addressing outstanding bug reports and feature requests they waste time on round logos, that are reducing a perfectly good feature. They introduce it without asking and are not willing to take it back even tho the community is massively complaining. What may come next is another bold price increase because of this great new feature - or even worse, it will be sold separately as a mandatory plugin for the same price as Confluence itself.

Atlassian, what are you doing? Please get real again and care for your customers.

why

Workaround

For a workaround involving CSS (as well as background on why rounded logos were introduced), please see this comment.

?

Simply bring back the old code and dump everything about round logos. Is it so hard to understand?

This has to be the most ridiculous issue ever. Can you guys stop wasting mine and the other customers freakin' time and just fix the freakin' thing?

And NO CSS IS NOT A FREAKIN' WORK AROUND FOR ONDEMAND CUSTOMERS.

Seriously, this is so embarrassing.

So a rectangular logo will be reduced to tiny size in a circle. That's still not professional-looking and it breaks a lot of companies' logo standards.

I think we should appreciate the open discussion with Atlassian - but IMHO I don't think that they will change their mind again.

From their point of view they did already a change: they provided an option to increase the size of the logo - even if it's still rounded. And they try to fix it in a more general way: CONF-35037

No, I'm not related to Atlassian - and I deeply convinced that the cost-benefit ratio are not well studied so far because customers are not expecting a rocket science modification (restore existing behavior) - and most of us are very annoyed about the current situation (check comments).

But let's face it - this company have changed, and they will continue to change - and they will leave customer behind.

That's why I try to focus on a compromise / workaround which is IMHO feasible for Atlassian because it's respects their self-conception for design and still leaves an options for their customers - and we can not wait until CONF-35037 is implemented.

That's why I'm looking for your feedback for a specific idea - please comment on CONF-35127.

@Shane @Aura - fair points.

I also am seeing in this discussion a mixture of concerns/expectations between features and platforms (server vs cloud), and consequently audiences too. The matrix indeed has different needs/requirements sometimes.

I would agree that when a change is technically feasible and logical, and also not grossly service affecting (which the logo seems like it would not be, on face value), indeed the PMs should listen, or make the feature optionalized.

I guess we will see ... if they listen, act, or stonewall.

Ah! JIRA Studio - well that makes sense. It was more closely based on the Server version imo.

Have you ever used Quicken cloud and the desktop version? The cloud/SaaS version is scaled back, and imho, some of of that scaling-back is simply a NO GO. I switched back to desktop version.

I mention this just an example; most SaaS products have to take a step back (i.e., be a little less rich) from the server versions/features; this is common. They simply cannot technically be the same on everything, at least out the gate. But they provide other convenience - hosting and no self-managed upgrades. It's a trade-off.

I do not know if your other concerns are related or if the Server version would be better for you - but my guess is maybe. Happy to help you get hosted on a "like"-onDemand experience (no self-maintenance), but with the richer Confluence server version... or even to just answer questions to help (but it still does not solve the logo issue for now).

I do not wish to digress this thread off-topic anymore. ellen@appfusions.com if you wish to discuss.

I don't believe I am taking cheap shots. I see a vendor that isn't hearing the basic issue. This is very similar to my experiences with another vendor. They had a good product that combined a wiki, a tracker, and a version control system. The system was good 4 years ago. Unfortunately, that vendor made design decisions that negatively affected our ability to do development. Because of those design decisons, we moved off of that system onto the Atlassian suite. This is what I see happening with the Atlassian tool suite now.

It is not that the circle logo is "a bit bothersome" that is the issue. The issue is that the decision is being defended and that the people setting the ticket to resolved appear to be either unwilling or unable to understand the issue. I have to agree with @shane that things change too often with a tool. Base functionality should be more stable after 7 years of development.

That said, I hope that the core Atlassian developers figure out what their target audience is and make sure that audience is happy. I don't want to have to move to another tool suite in 4 years.

Incidentally, the stability concerns are Atlassian's, not mine, I'm paying for a service with SLAs from OnDemand.

If they are listening, I'm not seeing any evidence of it in any place. I have a number of vital issues that I watch, such as improved user administration on OnDemand, search that actually works to the same level as it used to on JIRA Studio, this stupid round logo thing, the list goes on. Most of these issues are things that have regressed over the years, and actually doing something about them would bring Confluence back to where it was.

@Shane and others..

I agree that the circle logo thing is a bit bothersome. Twitter figured out the balance on that issue - I think Atlassian can. Hopefully they will hear and listen to some of these comments.

On the rest, I feel moved to defend since Confluence Wiki has come a long long LONG way since my first experiences in 2007 - and as a vendor that also works on add-ons - a lot of them - there is also massive amounts of stability that has come to the platform, despite the complexity. Compared with so many other collaboration platforms, Confluence is pretty damn good.

There's so much you can do with core features, add-ons, integrations - but yes, like many tools, there is a learning curve, and takes time to change the tide in a large organization of users.

In short - technology is hard; users are harder. Things evolve. It is a journey, not a destination..

Cheap shots on the logo thing, sure. I understand your frustrations (also the branding arguments), as many others have also voiced - and I am sure Atlassian is listening too.

But I don't think the whole platform deserves the slams.

I'd say I think Atlassian lost the plot on this, but then I think they lost the plot a few years ago. For a so-called Enterprise Wiki, there sure are a lot of crappy things one has to teach users, most of my user base have just given up on using any of their products, because THINGS CHANGE TOO OFTEN and the convoluted things they had to learn to do things previous change to NEW convoluted things.

This insane circle logo thing for spaces is just icing on the cake.

You have an enterprise wiki, that people can't search, is difficult to administer, has regression issues with things like Office integration... but you know, it has ROUND logos, so everything is okay. That'll attract the shiny new things brigade as customers.

I find it amusing (in a gallows humour kind of way) that avatars can be square while logos are circles (not just round, but actual circles!). After all, we all know so many people with square faces...

Just to be clear - this is not a request to make avatars circular. I use the edges of the square to make my avatar unique!

Agreed. It's not clear whether John Masson actually understands the problem.

It's also a mystery as to why Atlassian would focus on workarounds for something so simple.

I heartily agree with your statement John, that "The sidebar has limited width, especially when collapsed." Given that you say this, why are you limiting space logos to 78% of their size? By making the width of the logo be X - and the height be X - and then requiring it to be round, you are making 22% of the space the logo occupies on the sidebar completely inaccessible. Your comment that most logos are rectangulare doesn't make the circle requirement any smarter. Remove the circle! Make it a square that occupies the same size as the circle. People like me with rectangular logos can fit our logos much more easily into a square than a circle.

This makes me question other design decisions on the part of Atlassian. If they can't understand the core issue on something as simple as the space taken by a circle vs. a square, what else are they doing that shows such a complete lack of understanding of this issue?

John, thank you for your comment - you wrote:

The sidebar has limited width, especially when collapsed. The new space directory and a number of drop downs which use the space avatar all have a restriction on how wide any logo can be, whether round or square.

Confluence provides themes - and this might by true for the new default theme, but this does not apply to the documentation theme

The documentation theme have no logo on the sidebar, only on the page - therefore enough space to keep the existing logo style.

Please re-enable the feature at least for the documentation theme until there is a solution in e.g. 12-18 month (until CONF-35037 job is done).

CONF-35037 might be a good idea for some people (not really for me, as of today),
but I don't see how this addresses the issue of changing rectangle logos to round logos.
For example, in the space listings, 35037 will not bring back the old functionality.
As Steve commented, our need is NOT to place huge images into the side bar. It may be small, but it may not be round. And it may not be a sqare, many logos are rectangles.
I do understand that there are limitations about the size of a logo. That's common practice elsewhere, too. I do not understand (nor accept) limitations to its outline.

Thanks for the response John, but as George says you still haven't done anything to solve this problem. We don't want to change the size of the logo - just to stop it being round. There's therefore no reason why the constraints should have any impact on this issue.

Of course your ideas for wider branding capability are welcomed, but that's likely to be months, if not years, away and that doesn't resolve our immediate problem of being stuck with the idiotic rounded logos.

Please Atlassian, just swallow your pride on this one, listen to your customers and allow us to have square or rectangular space logos. This is such a trivial issue for you to solve, but would clearly do a lot to appease some very annoyed customers.

If this wasn't such a serious topic I could actually enjoy the entertaining factor of it more. So, another month went by, probably used to work on the comment that has just been posted by John Masson. My opinion: John, whatever you say, however you say it, we want the corners of the space logo back! We do not want it to be wider, we do not want it to be higher. Your sizing constraints are not touched. You are simply erasing the corners of the logo with not even replacing it with something. It is wasted space! None of what you said so far is an acceptable argument. You may still call this "answered", true, but understand that nobody accepts the answer.

Branding the space like you suggest in CONF-35037 is a great idea. I will comment there for ideas I have on that one. It has nothing to do with this issue tho!

Hi All,

Firstly, let me say I appreciate the continued feedback on this and the passion shown for Confluence. Even if it's not exactly the kind we enjoy hearing it's always clear people are only upset because they love using Confluence. Secondly, apologies for the slow response to those who have replied since I closed the ticket.

I did make a mistake when I closed this - one on calling it "fixed", rather than "closed" or "won't fix" which I'll rectify, and for not doing what I was originally planning to - share our internal thinking on this topic. I'm always hesitant to talk about "vapour ware", i.e.: things that are not firmly scheduled on the roadmap, but this is one case where it would be more helpful than not.

I know there's been some discussion on round versus square logos, and what makes more sense for people / spaces, and to be honest, I hold no great opinion on that, the reality is what matters is that space avatars can no longer be unconstrained. This isn't an abstract design decision, but a core constraint now. The sidebar has limited width, especially when collapsed. The new space directory and a number of drop downs which use the space avatar all have a restriction on how wide any logo can be, whether round or square.

Which gets to the core of the problem. As am notes, this is most problematic for those with external customers of their own, where the space avatar is being used for branding. While it was never great in the first place, it's clear the changes mean the space avatar is now a terrible solution for branding a space.

So, we want to fix the core issue - give people the ability to quickly brand a space to make it distinctive. I've created a new ticket - CONF-35037 - with one early design we created of how this could look and work. It gives you a much bigger canvas to use for branding, that would cope with any logo and more. We would love to get your feedback on whether this would assist.

As I mentioned, we don't yet have a timeline for this work, it's just some very early thinking on how we could possibly solve this, but I think it's a good starting point for a discussion on meeting the needs of people on this ticket, so I'd very much appreciate you taking a look and giving us your early feedback.

Regards,
John

Just to ensure that Atlassian hear our voices: please vote here

CONF-34676 - "Provide a way to keep rectangular Space Logos in Confluence 5 especially in case of migration from Confluence 4".

Notes from the field: we are running one Confluence instance just to share it with our customers. Each space contains the customer logo according to their CI. I think you know the rest of the story ...

We just (yesterday, Saturday) upgraded from Confluence 4 to Confluence 5 ... and finally ?

marketing horror nightmare !#%!%$&$ - all the customer logos are now broken -

... and we have no option to rollback this change without killing other important project timelines. Our fault because we did no "visual" review during our testing? Probably. But after all the technical tests we never thought that this could happen ..

I'm sure you were very surprised about the reactions to your first logo decision - and now you came up with a solution which might comply to to your internal rules but does not meet the exceptions of your customers.

Actually all the votes should be multiplied with the amount of the customers of your customers - have you noticed that most of the drastic comments are related to the relation of your customer to their (internal, but mostly) external customers?

Your decision do have a significant impact on the relationship of your customers to their customer.

And the demand of rolling back this decision is not related to an attitude of defiance like " I'm as a customer want this feature back because I'm used to it for many years now " .....

Atlassian, I strongly recommend that you should re-think which "battlefield" you choose to fight with your existing customer base ... and if it's a really good idea start a debate on principles like e.g. "software development", "design" and "unnecessary features" to justify your decisions ...

I would like to emphasize and insist that this issue is reopened.
This issue is not resolved as you can clearly read in all comments.
I must say that I am disappointed about the ignorance and disrespect towards the user community here.

Attention **John Masson**

Please:

• Reopen this issue.
• Change your software so that it doesn't do anything to your customer's space logos. Just display them as is.
• Update the Atlassian Design Guidelines document so that this problem eventually gets fixed across all Atlassian products.

Why can't it be that simple? Do you have some artsy UI designer trying to bend the world to their will?

Agreed! We finally got Marketing to make us some cool animated Gifs for our spaces, and now half of them are unusable! Atlassian, why create additional work for your customers? Why waste our resources?

Steve - Exactly.

Why can't they just allow any kind of logo and not try to crop / warp / distort / disfigure / munge / mangle / blur / bend / twist / slant / garble / color / disfigure / defame / denigrate / impune upon its integrity? Isn't that the simplest solution and the easiest to implement? Why even do anything to the logos? Why are you doing this, Atlassian? WHY?

Felix - I think he meant that the whole debacle around this issue even existing is pointless, not the issue itself

Hey John, I would recommend you to read the whole topic as there are a lot of explanations why it is not pointless...
If you have Enterprise/Corporate Rules for Design it can be that you "violate" these rules by using the new atlassian versions with rounded logos... That's sadly causing trouble for enterprise admins. If you company is smaller than 500 people you may see it as pointless...

I wish it would be this easy as you think

Why oh why can't you just leave the logos alone? This is so pointless!

Wow, I went overseas for a bit over a week, and it seems I missed some excitement here.

I agree, this isn't a fix - plus even if it was, how will this work for the 200+ spaces that still have this problem that I didn't touch because I expected this silly decision to be reverted within a week or two?

Silly stuff like this and failing to add new REAL enterprise level features for OnDemand has really tried my patience, to the point where I have a costed proposal up to the board to migrate to another system.

I'll reiterate too - CSS isn't an option - using Atlassian OnDemand.

Doesn't work for us - not a fix.

How dare you mark this as resolved? This is not a fix. It's not even as good as the workaround I've been using for the past year.

Sorry, but this is not a fix - this is a hack that I could do with any good paint editor.

Our association spends a lot of time developing a brand - as you have. They are very specific therefore on the look-n-feel of everything associated with that brand. Rounded logos are way offside.

+1 to reopen this issue, or at a minimum confirm the CSS to revert to square logos.

"I'll now be marking this issue as closed."

Congratulations, John! I'm sure it's a relief to finally put this issue behind you. Too bad so many of us don't feel that way.

I worked in a software development company several years ago where we were constantly dogged by customer complaints on one poorly designed product feature. No matter how many workarounds we presented – and trust me, we presented a boatload of workarounds – we kept hearing about the issue. Many influential people in the organization brushed off the complaints; they reasoned that it would require too much time and resources to re-engineer the code to address these customers, who they referred to as "the screamers." (Fixing the issue would also mean the company was admitting they made a mistake.) The leadership simply decided that the complaints would stop if the screamers just took the time to follow our workaround steps.

After a couple years of this, customer surveys (and the company's financials) clearly showed that our people were bolting to the competition, whose handling of the same functionality was more logical and easier for users to understand. The company is no longer in business.

I sent this email to acampbell@atlassian.com back in February.
You asked for people to contact you directly about the whole “round logos” issue. Here are my two cents worth.

Make the logo square. This isn’t additional functionality nor complexity. This is a reversion to the original functionality which decreases complexity since people aren’t required to write custom css for their square logos. I can make a circle logo that will fit in the square with minimal loss of size. It doesn’t work the other way.

Basically, a lot of logos are not just pictures. They contain information and rounding logos, even ones that are square, makes them lose information. With a mere 48X48 pixels, making a square logo fit into a circle, makes that logo only 78.5% of the actual size (100*100 vs. 50*50*pi). By requiring a circle, we have the option of losing over 20% of our actual logo or making it 20% smaller.

This isn’t a problem with a logo that has all the information in the middle of the logo, like the ones you show. It is a big problem with square logos that are not concentrated in the middle. Also, with our population getting older, we need bigger fonts and bigger logos.

Here is an example of a square logo. I can read the original. The “rounded” logo is missing letters. The 78.5% logo is too small to read. Rectangular logos are hit much worse with the whole rounding requirement.
<png snipped>

Here is the logo of a major code effort where I work. Getting it into the 48X48 size makes it barely recognizable while having it be 78.5% just to fit in the circle made it hilariously small. Cropping it to a circle is a non-starter.
<png snipped>

Ines
PS – We purchase this functionality from you to make our job easier, not to require us to code CSS. I also find it amusing that while the logo is required to be a circle, the space it takes on the screen is a square.

Two additional things to note. In your example showing the new upload tool, your “square” logo example is not a valid example.

Try that with a logo that has elements that go out to the corners of the square, then measure the pixel dimensions of your original square logo and compare that to the pixel dimensions of the resulting rounded logo.

Also, as others have already mentioned, this new upload tool doesn’t solve the problem we have with rounded logos. The very reason we find forced rounded corners unacceptable is because it leaves us with only two options for logos that don’t fit within these silly circles: 1) just ignore the suddenly chopped off corners that appeared when we “upgraded” to the version that introduced these forced rounded corners (not an option for me) or 2) shrink all affected logos down to fit within the circle, making many of them illegible because, in many cases, the logos have to be reduced nearly by 50% in order to fit inside these ridiculous circles.

Note that, while rounded logos are used by other sites for user avatar photos, where each user only needs to modify one logo in order to work when those sites switch from squares to circles, you have chosen to implement this “feature” in the worst place possible by applying it to an element for which dozens if not hundreds of instances exist on our systems which you are forcing your users to modify in order to fit in these circles…which I’m fairly certain none of us asked for.

They’re fine for user photos where I only have to change my photo, but maddeningly frustrating for space photos where we have to change dozens if not hundreds of them based on your one change.

Who here doesn’t have anything better to do with their time than re-sizing or re-uploading a bunch of logos so they can fit inside a circle and become barely legible?

Dear Atlassian,

The people posting here asking you to restore the ability to use a square logo without the corners being chopped off and without having to shrink it down to fit inside a circle we don’t want are your customers. While many of us may not be the ones signing the checks to you, we do work closely with the people who do and we are telling them how ridiculous you’ve been about truly resolving this issue which our users are complaining to US about.

Please give us the option to enable or disable rounded corners for space logos in our admin settings. Heck, you can even enable it by default if you like, just give your paying customers…the people who help keep your lights on and the people who recommend (or don’t recommend) you to other potential customers…the option to disable it instead of forcing rounded space logos on everyone.

I’m sure it looks beautiful in testing, but for those of us with dozens, if not hundreds of spaces in our production environments that are using logos designed to make full use of the square real estate provided in all previous versions, we just need a “rounded space logos” checkbox. That’s it. The new upload tool doesn’t solve anything for us as we still end up having to shrink our square logos down to nearly half the size in order to fit inside the circle.

our legal department requests everyone to NEVER mess around with our company logo.

Changing it from rectangle to square or to a circle IS among the forbidden activities.
I assume this is the same situation at many other companies.

+1 to all the comments above.
Atlassian is not authorized to change uploaded logos in any way !!! (besides of reducing the size, as long as the aspect ratio remains the same)

A simple reading of the title of this bug "Provide a way to avoid the automatic rounding of space logos" should indicate that it is neither "fixed" nor "resolved." Didn't you read any of the comments on this issue? Very disappointing.

Actually, after thinking a bit more about it - this feature doesn't add any value what so ever! This was almost as easy to do in Paint (or any image editing software), before uploading the logo to Confluence. So the solution you've given us is no improvement.

+1

I still vote for
1) This issue is not fixed
2) I still want rectangular space logos without any enforced rounding. At least as an option that works in OnDemand.

This fix does not solve the problem.
Missing feature is to let us choose or not to activate logo rouding during logo upload (maybe with a dedicated checkbox ?)
Some square entreprise logo need to stay square and use full logo placeholder !!

Are we on candid camera here? You are developing a feature that is irrelevant to the problem, in fact it would not have been needed if you didn't create the problem in the first place, and now you resolve this ticket? I find your approach very unprofessional and it shows no respect for your customers.
We don't want rounded logos. What part of that don't you understand? Nobody had a problem when they were rectangular.
Please reopen ticket. This is not over (resolved) yet.

So, you implemented the change - before talking to us? Again?

One question about the feature. If the Google example you've shown above, you resize it so that it fits within the rounded space logo. And you show it with a 410x488 image. But that is then further scaled down to 48x48 pixels, right? So many company logos will be not only scaled down to 48 pixels, it will have to be scaled down even further to fit within the rounding.

I still vote for
1) This issue is not fixed
2) I still want rectangular space logos without any enforced rounding. At least as an option that works in OnDemand.