This has had a significant impact for our new users in particular.  Having a clearly defined tab helped them tremendously when they were reorganizing spaces and importing data.  I really hope it gets brought back.

So they take away a feature you paid for, then tell you to go buy it back from a third party. In what world does this make sense? 

They want you to go to the Atlassian store and buy a plugin now. Thankfully, there is one available called Cleaner.

I would have to concur that the removal of this feature represents a mistake of staggering ignorance. how, pray tell, are we supposed to find orphans now? Foolishness. 

Hi Rebecca,
I confirm you that the tab has been removed on the 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 even if the documentation for those versions are still mentioning it

The documentation for 7.0 indicated that this tab would be removed. However, the documentation for 7.1 and 7.2 include info on the orphaned pages tab. Did Atlassian decide to leave the tab in place? We need to know before we plan an upgrade.

If you are going to remove this functionality then Atlassian should create some replacement tools instead of continuing the trend of offloading features to the Marketplace or just deprecating more functionality.

But i do not see if a page has no incoming links on the reorder pages screen. This is a helpful information. Will you display this in any other way or have the space admins open every single "maybe orphaned" page and open the page information to check this manually?

We use the orphaned pages screen frequently. It is an easy way to identify and edit orphans. Please retain access to this page.

I concur also. I use it as Senior Administrator Confluence.

The justification for removal is a logical fallacy.  In complex and dense spaces, reorder pages on its own has no indication as to which pages are orphans. It would be far more useful for the feature to remain and expanded to show all true orphans: Any page in a space which has no incoming link. A page that is a child of even the space homepage,  with no incoming links – a common situation with inexperienced users – is essentially invisible without perusing the page tree. Said inexperienced users (arguably, most users) won't go looking through page trees to see if they just happened to miss content.

I concur with Bill. I haven't needed this feature so far, but it seems like something that might be sorely missed one of these days.

What about a compromise – replacing it with a "Highlight orphaned pages" button on the "Reorder pages" screen, next to the "Sort alphabetically" button?

I understand the motivation to making the UI cleaner, and makes sense for new users. But you are penalizing power-users with years of Confluence experience, who may use this feature infrequently, but then when they do, they have to hunt to figure out what happened to that tab. So much of what I do in Confluence is muscle memory.

So when streamlining your product, put as much effort in to not penalizing your power users as you do in attracting new users, please.