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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I'm not surprised.

A few days ago[0] I was writing a Jira ticket after hitting the "Create" button and I wrote the description (the body of the ticket) for ~30 minutes. I switched the ticket type from A to B (no epics involved) and it wiped out the entire description. All I did was select a different item in a select drop down box provided by the form's UI.

There was no warning it would clear the description and no draft saved. I lost 30 minutes of work.

I normally manually copy textareas every few minutes on any Atlassian page because I don't trust their site (to be fair I do this for most sites too) but in the above case I had just copied a link reference which overwrote my clipboard. At the time I also didn't have a multi-clipboard tool installed since it was using a company issued machine that I don't have tricked out yet.

[0]: https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1540353527859466246

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I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.

It had never happened to me except for Confluence and Microsoft Teams. Firefox even preserves the typed text between reloads of the page - so unless the web app hacks the textarea somehow, the text will stay there.

I also prefer to write my stuff offline and than paste it to a web interface. That works great, until you write markdown and paste in into Confluence. Instead of just accepting markdown and formatting it in the same way it does when you type markdown, Confluence puts it between code tags..

Jira does this better, but is still weird with their text formatting. There are two different kinds of input fields, one of them accepts markdown, the other one some other kind of markup language. Copying some formatted text from one of the inputs to the other doesn't work because of this.

> That works great, until you write markdown and paste in into Confluence. Instead of just accepting markdown and formatting it in the same way it does when you type markdown, Confluence puts it between code tags..

If you are in the new editor for Confluence Cloud (i.e. the editor based on ProseMirror rather than TinyMCE), you can sometimes get it to do "the right thing" of converting pasted markdown to formatted text by copying from a different text editor. For example, for me copying from windows notepad always does the right thing, but copying from vscode doesn't.

You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about the worst app to write on. Not even going to go into how it's almost devoid of useful commands.

Make one mistake, you're good. Make two, tough luck, you can only undo once. Accidentally select some (or all) text and type over it then somewhere else? Today's really not your day. It's actually worse than textboxes in this respect.

This happened to me more times than I'd like to admit before I knew better.

Notepad++. Or Vim. Or any editor.

This is how I work as well, but Sublime is my preferred editor. Same on both Windows and MacOS. Autosaves everything. Super fast.

>You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about the worst app to write on.

It's actually one of the best on Windows, because if you leave your computer for a moment and it randomly decides to restart to install a Windows Update, often a notepad with unsaved changes will block it from restarting, whilst unsaved work elsewhere won't.

Vs Notepad++ that simply autosaves in that case? Only problem there is when you realise you have 50 tabs of scratch data you were expecting to have been discarded by now but are all still loaded up next time it starts up...

I think he considers notepad.exe one of the best applications expressly because it stops Windows from restarting when he doesn't want Windows restarted, which, ironically, it presumably wouldn't do it if had Notepad++'s better-designed and usually preferable behavior. (The Notepad+Windows case seems like botches (individually user-hostile forced reboots and poor handling of state on restart for Windows and Notepad respectively) partially cancelling each other out.)

That's sad and true. Happened to me many times.

Atlassian’s WYSIWYG editors are some of the buggiest bits of UI I’ve ever had the misfortune of using. Writing anything in Jira or Confluence is an exercise in misery. Even basic stuff like hyperlinks often go wrong.

I somewhat agree. For me the pain point is that confluence randomly loses the connection with the editor.

As far as confluence, or just about every web tool I've used that has text areas (slack, etc) - I really wish that would be handled over to the browser.

The problem with JIRA is that yes, everyone uses it, but most people hate it. In my experience, the only people that advocate for it are PM/PMO/TPM type people who need very specific and customizable workflows and reports. And even then, they continually run into quirks and bad UX everywhere.

This leaves them very vulnerable to another company taking their market share, as soon as they create something better that is extensible enough to get management signoff. I know a lot of companies have tried and failed here, but someone's going to eventually do it.

I can understand your frustration, and there should be some warning, but this is not a bug.

Every issue type is configured with its associated issue-create screen and that screen has its fields. When you change the issue type during issue creation you're replacing one set of fields with another which results in the information loss you experienced. This just doesn't affect the description field, but all other system fields and custom fields.

Still a bug of unexpected behavior for a user. The easiest fix is a warning pop-up that changing forms will clear all information currently typed.

It's a UI bug. It should warn you if there are non-trivial amounts of text in fields that would be overwritten by a state change.

I guess you don't use Windows but in case you do, you should use clipboard history. Just press Win+V and enable it, then press that combination again anytime you want something from the history, and a UI opens up with your last copied things. It supports schreenshots too.

Sounds like an opportunity to create a chrome add-on that can save any field data. I believe most session managers do that but if the field is wiped out, so is the cache.

Just a thought, but a lot of Jira installs often have wacky addons and such. Maybe one of them created an undesirable interaction with Jira that caused this. Is that a reliably reproducible bug? Maybe something with how your team configured the other issue types? Very annoying bug regardless.

I'm not sure, I didn't set up our Jira account but it looks like default behavior based on this screenshot: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id...

That "Issue Type" dropdown box is what I changed a value for and it cleared the description below it (also seen in the screenshot).

Our set up might be pretty basic because the A to B from my original comment was "New Feature" to "Improvement" which is included in that screenshot.

https://bitbucket.org/nicklassandell/chrome-form-recovery/

saved my sanity more than once regarding lost jira inputs

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