Enforce "what did you change" in Confluence?

[Esther Strom]

We've been using Confluence for years as a small company with users who are well-trained to fill in the "what did you change" field when editing a page.

We were recently purchased by a much larger company, and although we've done training, due to hundreds of users in multiple geographical locations, I can no longer manage things page by page.

Is there any way to enforce the use of that field when editing a page (of any kind)? I'm open to add-ons, if required.

[James Dellow · Accepted solution]

@Esther Strom  not sure if you are aware, but the "what did you change" field has actually been removed in the new editor in Cloud:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html

Atlassian say this is because:

"it had almost no usage, but added significant visual clutter and complexity to Confluence. Instead of using change comments, you can see the difference between published versions of a page in the page history."

[Esther Strom]

Thanks; I was not aware. We haven't received the new editor rollout for most of the page types yet. 

[stasleo]

Rediculous update. Now there is no way to track WHY users introduced this or that change. A user may change requirements from A to B, but the reason behind it will be lost in time.

[Jonathan Smith · Accepted solution]

Hi @Esther Strom ,

  The Publish "on click" action would need to be modified to validate the "what did you change" box has content. This sounds like a feature request.

I think you will find more marketplace options when it comes to page publishing options / approvals versus requiring comments. 

• Comala Publishing

Hope this helped some :)

- Jonathan

[Esther Strom]

Thanks for the response, but

1. that plugin does way more than we'd need; we're not looking for approval processes or publishing automation; we just want to make sure that a field that's natively provided is actually used.
2. that plugin is not available for Cloud.

So it sounds like the simple answer is "no".

ETA that I've submitted a suggestion to Atlassian; if anyone else finds this question, please vote for it: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67035

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

It should be possible to write a Javascript one-liner, which is called when the user clicks the "Save" button, verifies if he entered a non-blank script to the "Comment" field and rejects the save if not.

There are multiple ways to inject these little Javascript fragments to various Confluence screens (like using the announcement bar, apps, etc.)

[Esther Strom]

The announcement bar doesn't exist on Cloud, and I don't want to start hacking things.