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Comment by tbabb | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor.

In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup is bad UX. Give them a WYSIWYG; that's fine.

But don't remove the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a perfect one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that satisfies that).

IIRC there was a time when Confluence axed their markup, and inevitably a table or a template would get completely screwed, and there was nothing you could do but recreate it. TERRIBLE design.

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> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor.

Oh my goodness: triggered.

I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this.

"But, but, we used it at blah company."

"Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it."

I DO NOT want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, capricious, and neutered version of Microsoft Word 6 to edit the contents of a web page.

I will become extremely displeased with you if you waste my time by trying to persuade me it's a good idea. It's not.

Yeah, the very first time I used Confluence I was in shock of how developer's at one time could have thought this was a good or useful product for discussing/planning code changes.

For ticketing software, I find Clubhouse to be much better than JIRA. Normal markdown that doesn't drive you insane. Much slicker all around.

Concerning Clubhouse.io, it looks great, is there a download version? I know “Cloud is the way to go”, but I work in Men’s Rights (DV abuses, etc) and it is usually something that cloud companies don’t want on their platform, so we’re constantly at risk of being revoked.

No modern software works locally, it's always all in the cloud. That's why most large companies (and some cases like yours) stick with the big guys like Atlassian and Microsoft; the new competition doesn't support their data requirements.

A lot of that stuff still works self-hosted, which is a hard requirement in some places.

Have you tried something git based? That way the tickets, etc, exist on your machine and there's no real risk of being de-platformed.

Whilst not an actual answer to your question, I thought it might be a good direction for you to look into.

Also, I've seen Redbooth (formerly Teambox) we'll recommended and since it's OSS it can be self hosted pretty easily.

I've just looked at the to 4 sites for mensrights and see hosting on Azure, GCP, Cloudflare and godaddy.

Do you have any links to any cloud or other hosting company kicking out any mens rights sites?

The SPLC determined that the most famous of them were “promoting hate”, so PayPal pulled service, and it’s always the roulette on what is going to be pulled next. Each year the International Conference on Men’s Issues had to change venues at least once, and one year the venue pulled out less than a month before the conference.

Don’t say it doesn’t exist. And saying “All men are pigs” is apparently not a reason to pull support from the female equivalent. As much as “Women should be sentenced to smaller prison times than men” is apparently not a hindrance to staying head of the judges of UK’s Supreme Court.

So yeah, we need to avoid using cloud services.

Which is the "most famous of them"?

In this UK it's probably "mankind", hosted on a microsoft owned IP, I assume azure.

I googled "splc men's rights promoting hate", and it looks like A Voice For Men is what alexis_fr is referring to.

Never heard of it. Wikipedia says

> for profit

And

> Its editorial position is strongly antifeminist and frequently accuses feminists of being misandrist.

somewhat different to things like the white ribbon campaign that it tried to hijack. There's plenty of charities and organisations working to stop domestic abuse of men. This looks like something that would fit well with breitbart.

In the Wikipedia article, the prominent example being used was an write (Paul Elam?) saying that victim of domestic abuse should strike back. SPLC interpreted it in context of mens right to mean that the writer is inciting violence against women. Technically true.

I wonder if in any feminist writing there are feminist who argue that victims should fight back against their attackers. How should that be interpret? Todays news in Sweden we had the first court day of the person who initiated the Swedish metoo movement. She posted a message on social media about a coworker who she said raped her. The prosecutor filed charged against her, arguing defamation as it caused emotional and economical damage to the named person. Technically this is correct and the expected result of the law suit is actually a guilty verdict for the accuser. It also mean that technically anyone who encouraged similar behavior, in the context of feminist writing, is guilty of inciting violence against men.

Swedish defamation law is also a bit different from UK/US laws in that the truthfulness is not a saving criteria. Causing someone harm through trial by media is illegal with only a few exceptions when dealing with major public figures. In the view of the legal system, harm is harm, and it is rarely justified.

Phabricator's ticketing system is excellent, and it's fully open source. Probably the best open source project management tool out there.

It's also very easy to self-host.

Was super skeptical about all those Jira replacement SaaS’s out there. But Clubhouse is actually pretty good. For people on the fence, give it a try.

I for one am still waiting for usable task management SaaS - one that doesn't limit me to "epic/project/task" split, but instead recognizes that the work is being decomposed recursively, and has dependencies.

All I really want is a system that lets me arrange my tasks into a DAG. B is a subtask of A. C and D are subtasks or B. E is a subtask of D. F is a subtask of A, but depends on D being complete. It's simple and matches how people think about work. Add a capability for estimation (for the love of $deity, in durations, not dates!), and you can pull a critical path diagram straight out of it.

Is it so hard to make software like this? Why nobody does? And how come that some project management packages (like JIRA, AFAIR) explicitly mention subtasks as non-features, because they're not "agile enough". The only piece of PM software I've seen that's even capable of what I want is YouTrack by JetBrains, but even there, the graph nature of tasks is only an afterthought; the product tries very hard to look like Jira, with all its bad features.

I also want exactly this and have so far not found an example. I think most software is geared towards "good-enough" problem fitting, where only people who both understand the fundamental structure beneath planning, and care enough to want to implement it correctly, will want a DAG solution. However, I'm already working on quality DAG UI code so I'm tempted to divert temporarily to build such a tool if there's a market for it I'm not aware of.

Perhaps a weekend project/"show HN" to gauge interest would be warranted.

If you have time, please do, and if it's usable enough - task DAG, ability to add estimates in durations ("1 week", and not "2019-11-18 to 2019-11-25"), ability to add labels/tags and to search by it, and the ability to display tasks as a graph with critical path highlighted - you'll have your first paying customer right here.

If you ever get around working on this, or even demoing your DAG UI (I'm interested in UIs for DAGs for other reasons too), please shoot me an e-mail (address in my profile).

I've just sent you an email - I was on the fence about building this previously but I'll definitely get something going now.

Yes!! I’d be interested too (email in my profile as well).

Great! I'll drop you an email shortly

Yes! Even if only for my personal tasks, yes!

Subtasks with intelligent dependencies, durations, and maybe top level item prioritization... I'd give up my hand rolled Google sheets idea in a heartbeat.

if you drop me an email (my address is in my profile), I can let you know when I have something to share :)

Oddly most of these systems will let you specify dependencies, but not show them. Even the good old GANTT chart would let you do that. JIRA has umpteen kinds of "ticket X relates to Y" one of which is "depends on".

I think it's some sort of weird cultural impedance mismatch where the teams have sort of moved over to Kanban or Scrum or whatever, but the managing structures haven't. I used to work somewhere where managers spent a regular big chunk of time manually reconstructing GANTT from Microsoft TFS Kanban boards...

It's a doubly weird cultural impedance mismatch, because I am a dev, and I used to laugh at all the MBA PM gaant PERT mumbo jumbo... until I spent some time re-evaluating my work experience, thinking about what kind of things I'd like to improve in the way my team and I manage our work... and realized I'd very much like a DAG and a GAANT chart and critical path determination.

Have you tried Microsoft Project or the various web SaaS clones? The ones with the task hierarchy on the left (of arbitrary depth) and a Gantt chart on the right. I think they all support entering effort estimates (like “5 days work”), dependencies, and so on.

Was there something you didn’t like about them?

Haven't seen MS Project in a decade. I haven't found any SaaS like it, but maybe I don't know the right keywords to search for.

I came across this list https://thedigitalprojectmanager.com/microsoft-project-alter... (scroll down for the screenshots of the various products) but I haven't used any of the tools on that list. But they're certainly out there.

I used https://liquidplanner.com/ for a bit, it was clunky and slow and expensive, but did get the job done for what I needed.

I wonder if SmartSheet can do this - it’s pretty flexible and let you change visualizations but the underlying data can easily have the relationships you seek since it started as a GANNT tool. I haven’t played with custom templates much but your thoughts might be a good reason to go experiment!

Phabricator does this! It even renders a nice outline view of all your task dependencies. You can built arbitrary m:n graphs between your tasks and view them as a table with current state and so on.

At this point, I like Azure Dev Ops more than the Atlassian suite.

Apparently clubhouse is working on an integrated wiki system[1] too. Can't wait to try it out (alas, beta invite not avail for the free account my company is currently using for evaluation).

[1]: https://clubhouse.io/blog/write-beta

> I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this.

It's worse than literally every other wiki I've ever used; even worse than phpBB.

Having to edit something in confluence always ruins my day

For a period, every time I saved changed to a page in Confluence, I had to completely clear cache and session data in my browser because it would just display blank pages until I did. It doesn’t do that anymore, but it’s still a slow, buggy piece of shit.

We also use Bitbucket at work, which is laughably unreliable.

Just to let you know, if you haven’t used it in a whole, Confluence (Cloud) has a completely new editor that seems decent, it just rolled out a few weeks/months ago.

Because of this we've implemented a tool called `mark` [1], which allows to write articles in markdown and render them as native Confluence pages.

If you're interested in having self-hosted service for that, just drop us an e-mail here [2].

[1]: https://github.com/kovetskiy/mark/ [2]: https://mark.reconquest.io/

Just curious what do you guys use for KB or distributed project management that doesn't dictate a per user license?

> IIRC there was a time when Confluence axed their markup, and inevitably a table or a template would get completely screwed, and there was nothing you could do but recreate it. TERRIBLE design.

There was. I was using Confluence at the time, and it broke a lot of things. There was a wonderful filed bug at the time with a lot of angry people on it, where they promised to bring the old mechanism back as an option, and they never did. That told me everything I needed to know about Atlassian.

Atlassian Jira/Confluence SUUUUUCKS. They have given up on making anything better. I try to do as much as possible on Markdown files in a GitLab repo using Atom's Markdown preview (e.g., documentation). Gliffy diagrams are still OK.

Same, README.md for most everything I can. Searching for info in the repo is also more productive than the search nightmare in jira/confluence.

GitLab employee here, nice to hear that GitLab is helping solve some of these workflow issues for you.

For sure! One thing to take a look at might be markdown numbering rendering in the browser. E.g., if I use `1. 1. 1. ` I only get ones, not 123 (last I checked).

They're currently trying to force this into pull requests in Bitbucket. Right now you can revert to the old-style pull requests with Markdown support, but that is going to go away once the new system is out of beta.

I really regret going with Atlassian here; I would have advised against it if I knew about this. I will definitely advise against it in the future.

This is why I heavily advocate for not using Atlassian products. I use the "can't trust Australia" statement as a supporting argument but the terrible editor is what started my crusade. My company uses Jira but I do all my tracking in Clubhouse. We have Confluence but most of us write docs in Google Docs because it's less painful. I recently got us moving away from Bitbucket too. If Slack stands by this change (like they did with removing the IRC bridge), I'll be pushing hard to get rid of it before we start growing.

100% agree that Clubhouse > JIRA. If I hear a company uses JIRA, I will actually question whether I want to work there.

Can you recommend a replacement for Jira that can be self-hosted? Many companies cannot store their data on a third-party server.

There's at least Redmine. Uses Textile by default, but there were plugins for Markdown.

Redmine nowadays also comes by default with Markdown.

Menu Administration -> Settings -> General tab

There's a drop down for Text formatting which you can set to Markdown.

Take a look at Gemini[0] for self-hosted issue management and help desk ticketing.

[0] https://www.countersoft.com

My organization uses all of Atlassians products. Every time I as for a sane alternative and get shot down I question whether I want to work here.

I work on this specific issue at Atlassian. Can you email me at jcolli2@atlassian.com to talk more, would love to discuss your markdown use cases for things like comments.

I stopped using confluence the moment I realized the markdown editor was removed. I don't care so much about the flavor, but there's something very annoying about needing to get fancy with the way I edit text to preserve formatting.

Same here. I'd made some nice (and quite simple) tooling to parse docstrings out of a Python project and turn them into Markdown that I could copy-and-paste into Confluence. It was so convenient to run something like "make documents" to basically compile the project's documentation from inspecting the project itself! But then Confluence broke their editor by making it WYSIWYG-only. And in response, I broke Confluence by convincing our CTO to ditch that now worthless documentation system for something else.

What is something else? I’m interested, if it’s available for download (not cloud).

Been working on Documize[0] for a while now and we get plenty of Confluence people moving over.

Open source core supporting WYSIWYG, Markdown, Code and more.

[0] https://github.com/documize/community

Fun fact: the editor is open-source (I think this is the same) https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2/src/master/pac...

As I have been fiddling with ProseMirror I've found out that their editor is the most extensive PM-based editor out there.

Every Atlassian product used / still uses a different markdown format, infuriating

In Azure DevOps there are two Markdown formats, Project Wiki (Default project wiki and Pull Requests) and Code Wiki (Repository as Wiki).

It's quite annoying.

Same here. I had to resort to making all edits in my browser's devtools instead. If a page in our Confluence wiki looks decent, there's a good chance it's because I hand-edited the underlying HTML. (There's also a good chance it's old, because I've largely given up on using Confluence for new articles. I just email distro lists like it's 2001)

When I had to use confluence, I did all my editing in gists and copied the rendered version into confluence. I've done that with jira too but the copy/paste seems to get mangled.

Confluence/Jira is the worst product suite I've ever had the misfortune of using, I can't fathom how it became popular or who finds it useful.

Elsewhere in this thread is the HIPPO acronym, and that's how one ends up with Jira/Confluence: "no one got fired for buying it" combined with "pointy haired bosses love it"

It's been my overwhelming experience that managers love the _idea_ of Jira, but then the day-to-day in the trenches experience of battling its workflow, its markup, its ... everything ... gets pushed down onto busy people, and even if enough engineers revolt, now you have a "well, we're already so committed to Jira we can't leave now" style reply (again, in my experience)

Yes, was looking for this post. I rarely used the markup in the previous editor, but the new editor is so buggy I keep looking for an icon to switch to markup.

I’m surprised at this. The latest cloud editing experience in Confluence (Cloud) is pretty great in my opinion.

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