MV

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Dear Atlassian


To whom it may concern...

I have been using your Confluence since 2007 and the ease of it was just a joy. Ok, it had its shortcomings, but I could live with them, they didn't annoy me. Confluence, you were easy to learn, you were just a plain text editor, you had enough room for easy customizations. All this made that I could focus on my job, which happens to be technical writing in software companies. My last version I worked with was 3.5, but then came August 2013.
In that month I started at a new company where they use a 5.x version. Now one (yes only ONE) month later and you make me already sick.

I suppose that the function of the new interface is to be more user-friendly than a plain text editor. I have to admit, inserting macros is a step forward, same for inserting warnings, tips, notes,...  BUT, what the hell have you been doing with lists? To insert or add a numbered item to an existing numbered list, you have to be a magician. Luckily CTRL-Z does work in your editor.
And why can't I use a bulleted list in for example a warning block, when this block is in a numbered list? Can you give me an explanation for that?

Table of contents macro, maybe it's not your fault, but why do you use different styles? A table of contents is supposed to have a consistent layout, but why some items are in bold, others in a large font-size and some others in smaller font-size, I really don't see the benefit of it.

Apart from my aforementioned vexations, I have a last one to mention. When you create a PDF of a space, the links in the PDF document refer to the online documentation, whereas in 3.5 and earlier versions, they referred to the page inside the PDF. Did this function moved to more comfy places, is it playing trollface, ... You were in there and now you're gone, how hard can it be to get it back?
This bug is reported 721 days ago (27 September 2011, yes that's almost TWO years). It surprises me that you do go to the selected section when you click an item in the table of contents. So where's the difference? I don't see any so just FIX IT, and if you can't fix it, FIX HARDER!

I can't get the idea out of my head that you, Atlassian, are becoming like that other well-known tech giant, founded by Bill Gates. That company too is very good at ditching good parts of software, creating new versions that annoys people, and not listening to their customers.

Perhaps our annual fee is just 0,00000005% of your annual turnover, which makes us just a 'no-influence-at-all' company for you, but I just don't care. Perhaps that some day I will embrace you again with love and care, but right now, I'm ditching you.

Sincerely

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