[polote]

> I can not fathom why anyone would use this for storing documentation for code etc, as opposed to storing things direct in a repo.

Because storing documentation in repos doesn't work great when you want to organize your documentation, discover or search it.

Having thousands of documentation files in a repo, next to the code is unmanageable, much more than thousands of documentation files in Confluence. In Confluence, you can put rights, tags, titles, organize in folders, assign owners, put comments, ....

Is Confluence good at it ? Not much, but it doesn't mean we should remove Confluence.

[dont__panic]

Confluence is a fantastic way to ensure that nobody ever finds your documentation. The WYSIWYG editor is so painfully slow, buggy, and laggy, it actually reduces the chance of anybody bothering to update documentation. When organizations change names, URLs change completely and you can sometimes never find a linked page again after it moves. Navigation in confluence is painfully slow, even though it's a bunch of static text. Embedding code snippets or images is an exercise in frustration.

It's a problem.

[solarkraft]

Confluence sucks! But it does have one of the best editing experiences I've seen (it also sucks, but less than the rest). You can privately draft pages before publishing them, get diffs of versions, it auto-saves and you even get real time collaboration with others. That's worth a lot, imo.

[dont__panic]

Interesting. Personally I feel that markdown is a far better editing experience, but that's mostly just a bias towards simple tools. If the confluence editor didn't huff, puff, lag, and choke on even simple documents, I might be able to bear it. But when it takes sometimes multiple seconds for a keystroke to register in the editor, I get so infuriated I just don't bother.

[kyriakos]

Agree about no one finding your documents. I have trouble finding my own documents in it, don't expect others to be able to find them. Unless you are absolutely obsessive about organisation and linking documents things remain a disjointed mess, would have been cleaner to store markdown in the file system in a directory tree than in confluence.

[polote]

I mean, I know. I've wrote an article called "We deserve better than Notion and Confluence" and I spend my days building an alternative to Confluence for orgz.

But I still think that Confluence is better than nothing