Version History

In this page

Version history

Version	Date	Notes
9.2.0	26/04/2023	Preparation for Confluence Server end-of-support. (Last release for Confluence Server!)	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
9.1.0	16/02/2023	"Discuss" quick action improvements. Java 17 support.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
9.0.0	23/01/2023	Compatibility release for Confluence 8.0.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.12.0	03/11/2021	Compatibility release for Confluence 7.14.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.11.0	24/08/2021	Compatibility release for Confluence 7.13.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.10.0	23/04/2021	Compatibility release for Confluence 7.12.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.9.0	29/08/2020	Compatibility release for Confluence 7.7.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.8.0	27/08/2020	Content owners.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.7.0	06/07/2020	Compatibility release for Confluence 7.6.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.6.0	04/06/2020	Compatibility release for Confluence 7.5.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.5.0	29/11/2019	Support for Confluence read-only mode.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.4.1	08/10/2019	Maintenance release.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.4.0	07/10/2019	Compatibility release for Confluence 7.0.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.3.0	24/07/2019	Quick actions.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.2.0	30/05/2019	Default archiving configuration. Trusted group.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.1.0	28/09/2018	Data privacy (for GDPR).	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
8.0.0	31/08/2018	Support for the new Data Center Approved Apps program.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
7.5.0	27/06/2018	Compatibility release for Confluence 6.10.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
7.4.0	06/02/2018	Page view initialization. Multiple supervisors.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
7.3.0	31/01/2018	Compatibility release for Confluence 6.7.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
7.2.0	16/10/2017	Distinct style for archive spaces. Intelligent label filtering. Various useful improvements.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
7.1.0	09/09/2017	Compatibility release for Confluence 6.4.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
7.0.1	29/05/2017	Maintenance release ("Data integrity error in migrated archiving configuration")	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
7.0.0	24/05/2017	Support for Confluence Data Center. Compatibility release for Confluence 6.2.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
6.1.2	12/04/2017	Maintenance release ("Page Status Indicator overlay is zoomed in" fixed!).	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
6.1.1	27/03/2017	Maintenance release ("Comparison method violates its general contract" fixed!).	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
6.1.0	30/01/2017	Configurable data limits, various bugfixes.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
6.0.0	20/12/2016	Rebuilt for scalability: Content Update Index and data limiting.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
5.3.0	30/11/2016	Support for Brikit Theme Press. Updated for Bitvoodoo Enterprise Theme. Re-tested with Refined Theme and Scroll Versions.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
5.2.0	14/11/2016	Confluence 6 compatibility plus minor bugfixes.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
5.1.0	18/03/2016	New archiving strategies: Move / Copy and Trash / Trash. Faster archiving.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
5.0.0	05/01/2016	Blacklists, support for the Scroll Versions & the Bitvoodoo Enterprise themes.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
4.5.0	29/09/2015	Customizable notification emails, automatic page archiving on a specific date.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
4.4.0	20/07/2015	Bulk-apply global configurations to spaces.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
4.3.0	05/05/2015	Real-time page status browser / indicator, "archive" quick-action, REST API.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
4.2.0	06/02/2015	Compatibility release for Confluence 5.7.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
4.1.0	03/11/2014	Improved page view tracking, more robust archiving, no email noise.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
4.0.0	11/07/2014	New "Configure Archiving" interface, support for supervisors and archiver users.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
3.5.0	03/06/2014	Compatibility release for Confluence 5.5.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
3.4.0	08/04/2014	Page view tracking fixed for large spaces under MS SQL.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
3.3.0	29/01/2014	Pages expiring on a specific date.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
3.2.0	07/11/2013	Update for RefinedWiki Original Theme.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
3.1.0	22/10/2013	Compatibility release for Confluence 5.3.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download
3.0.0	23/09/2013	New feature: find the Confluence pages not viewed by anyone in the last N days.	Release Notes & Upgrade Guide	Download

Release notes

9.2.0

This version introduces a few changes as a preparation for the Confluence Server end-of-support. This is our last release for Confluence Server!

Important: don't forget that Confluence Server will be retired in February 2024!

Improvements

• On Confluence Server, a new message box informs administrators about the availability of the app's Cloud and Data Center versions.
• All URLs are updated to point to the documentation of the app's Data Center version.

Upgrading from 9.1.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

9.1.0

This version introduces improvements on the "discuss" quick action, Java 17 support and various fixes.

"Discuss" quick action improvements

The "discuss" quick action was improved with three valuable additions.

These improvements make the action more powerful especially in case of multi-user discussions:

1. The new link "Add owners" will add the content owners to the "Send to" field with one click. As content owners are frequently involved in review discussions or in making decisions about the content's lifecycle (should this be updated? should this be archived? etc.), this little utility is a significant time-saver.
2. The "discuss" notification email now shows the users that participate in the discussion. Each recipient will see who else was invited to the discussion. (You can customize its appearance or even remove it from the email template using the $replyToUsers Velocity context object.)
3. Now, when someone replies to an email sent by this quick action using "Reply All" in the email client, all original recipients will receive the reply. Unlike the built-in "Share page" feature, which is essentially a one-time one-direction message, "discuss" now allows continuous group email conversations about the page!

Learn more about the discuss quick action.

Java 17 support

Java 17 LTS is the latest long-term support release for the Java SE platform. Since Confluence 8.0.0, it is a platform supported by Confluence.

This app version is the first one which supports both Java 11 and 17. From now, Midori is committed to maintain the compatibility with both.

Security fixes

The internal versions of the following dependencies were updated:

1. Moment.js

We strongly suggest upgrading to this app version as soon as possible!

Bugfixes

• Fixed: When a space is totally empty (contains zero pages), its content quality becomes 50% unexpectedly.
• Fixed: The "Trusted group" selector doesn't contain any option in its drop-down, unless there are at least 3 characters entered.

Upgrading from 9.0.0

First, update your app using UPM (the app manager built in to Confluence).

To support the "discuss" quick action improvements in the notification emails, a new Velocity context object $replyToUsers was introduced. Therefore, the default notification email templates were updated in this app version. If you haven't customized the notification email templates (i.e. if you are using the defaults), then there is nothing else to do.

If you have made changes to those (adding instructions in the top is a very typical customization, for example), then you will need to migrate those customizations to the new templates.

Steps:

1. Copy the content of your current email template to a textfile old.txt. (It's a good idea to save it somewhere as a backup.)
2. Click Reset default under the email template. It will reset it to the new default (without your customizations).
3. Copy the content of this new default email template to another textfile new.txt.
4. Compare old.txt and new.txt, and merge all changes you made in the former to the latter. Use a visual merge tool (like WinMerge), and it will be trivial.
5. Copy the merged result back to Confluence and save it.
6. Repeat these steps for every notification template that you have customized.

9.0.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 8.0.

Confluence 8.0 compatibility

While there are no changes in terms of app features, lots of changes were made in the app's internals. Confluence 8.0 introduced API-breaking changes, upgraded critical dependencies and removed deprecated code. This app release is compatible with all those, plus it maintains compatibility back to Confluence 5!

Upgrading from 8.12.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.12.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 7.14.

Upgrading from 8.11.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.11.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 7.13.

Upgrading from 8.10.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.10.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 7.12.

Upgrading from 8.9.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.9.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 7.7.

Upgrading from 8.8.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.8.0

This version introduces the concept of content owners.

Note that "custom page owners" (the original name of this feature) was the second most popular feature request in our public feature request tracker. As end-user needs are the most important driver for the product roadmap, we strongly encourage you to visit the existing feature requests, cast your vote and write your use case in a comment!

(Insider info: the currently most popular feature request is coming soon, too!)

Content owners

Content owners are one or more manually selected users who are responsible for the content in a single page or in a whole page tree.

Content owners can optionally be notified when the page becomes not-viewed, expired or archived. The concept is similar to, for example, the author or the last modifier of the page, but while these are "implicit" roles (determined automatically), page owners are "explicit" (selected manually).

You may have noticed that we call them "content owners", not "page owners". We use the more general term, because they are responsible also for the attachments of the page, and also because in a future app version this feature will be extended to blog posts, as well.

Learn more about content owners.

Notable changes

In the next few releases, we will make the terminology more consistent throughout the app user interface and the documentation. We will use more precise terms and less synonyms. Note that these are changes only in the wording, the underlying features are not changed unless otherwise mentioned in the release notes.

In this version, we introduce the following changes:

• Terminology change: "archiving job" is now called "content lifecycle job".
• Terminology change: "archiving event" is now called "content audit log event", while "content events" (as a screen title) becomes "content audit log".

Bugfixes

• Fixed: when collapsing the node of a last sibling in the Content Status Browser, sometimes all nodes "below it" disappear from the UI.

Upgrading from 8.7.0

First, update your app using UPM (the app manager built in to Confluence).

Then, review your existing lifecycle configurations and consider turning on the "Notify owners" settings. When you create a new lifecycle configuration, the default settings described in the table below will be used, but for existing lifecycle configurations all those three will be set to "Off" at the version upgrade. This is because we want to avoid unexpected behavior caused by the silent configuration change. If you want to use the content owners feature with existing configurations (you should!), edit the existing configurations and turn on the "Notify owners" settings according to your needs.

	Default "Notify owners" setting
Page view tracking	On
Page expiration tracking	On
Page archiving	Off

To support the content owners feature, the new archiving reason "You're receiving this email because you're an owner" was added to the notification emails. Therefore, the default notification email templates were updated in this app version. If you haven't customized the notification email templates (i.e. if you are using the defaults), then there is nothing else to do.

If you have made changes to those (adding instructions in the top is a very typical customization, for example), then you will need to migrate those customizations to the new templates.

Steps:

1. Copy the content of your current email template to a textfile old.txt. (It's a good idea to save it somewhere as a backup.)
2. Click Reset default under the email template. It will reset it to the new default (without your customizations).
3. Copy the content of this new default email template to another textfile new.txt.
4. Compare old.txt and new.txt, and merge all changes you made in the former to the latter. Use a visual merge tool (like WinMerge), and it will be trivial.
5. Copy the merged result back to Confluence and save it.
6. Repeat these steps for every notification template that you have customized.

8.7.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 7.6.

Atlassian has fixed the bug that was introduced in Confluence 7.5.0 and made us to disable the "hide archive space" feature in the previous version of Better Content Archiving for Confluence. In this release we re-enabled that feature.

IMPORTANT: If you are using Confluence 7.5.0 or 7.5.1, don't forget to upgrade your Confluence version to 7.5.2 or newer (otherwise the app won't function correctly due to the above mentioned bug)!

Upgrading from 8.6.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.6.0

Recently released Confluence 7.5.0 introduced a bug around archiving spaces. The bug broke the "create archive space" mechanism in the Better Content Archiving app.

While we work with Atlassian on the bugfix, this temporary app version helps you to upgrade to Confluence 7.5.0. It disables only a fairly minor app feature that's affected by the bug, but even that feature can be worked around manually.

As soon as the bug is fixed by Atlassian, we will release another app version that re-enables the feature.

What feature is disabled in 8.6.0?

It doesn't matter if you checked setting the archive space's status to "Archived" in an archiving configuration, it will not work. Consequently, all newly created archive spaces will have the "Current" status. (Existing archive spaces are not affected, they remain in "Archived" status.)

This is somewhat misleading, but other than the side-effects below, it is harmless:

• Your users may receive duplicated search results: one from the fresh and the other from the archive space.
• Your users may see the pages that are located in the archive space in activity streams.
• Your users may "get lost" while navigating: they will see both the fresh and the archive space, containing similar and overlapping content.

All other app features work correctly.

Super-easy manual workaround: after a new archive space was created by an archiving execution, set its space status to "Archived" manually. (Unless you create large number of new archive spaces, it is absolutely manageable.)

Upgrading from 8.5.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.5.0

This version introduces compatibility with the so-called read-only mode in Confluence. As that feature is available only in Confluence Data Center, this particular app version does not introduce any new feature for Confluence Server users. (Even if so, Confluence Server users should upgrade to this version, too, because future versions will be built on the top of 8.5.0.)

Support for Confluence read-only mode

Read-only mode is a Confluence Data Center feature that helps performing maintenance tasks without stopping Confluence. Similarly to Confluence, the Better Content Archiving app also limits the app-provided actions the user can perform in read-only mode.

Learn more about the support for read-only mode.

Upgrading from 8.4.1

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.4.1

This version comes with two less-critical bugfixes with which we didn't want to delay the previous version, 8.4.0, the compatibility release for Confluence 7.0. Now these are tested and released for the public.

Bugfixes

• Fixed: the "Trusted group" field in the "Settings" screen cannot be used with 30,000 groups.
• Fixed: when the secure administrator session times out, saving blacklisted spaces will reset that to an empty list.

Upgrading from 8.4.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.4.0

Confluence 7.0 compatibility

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 7.0.

It may sound like a relatively simple release, but it's most definitely not. Confluence 7.0, being a major release, introduced significant changes including API-breaking ones. This app release is compatible with those.

Bugfixes

• Fixed: the "Last Execution" column in the Scheduled Jobs screen is empty for 2 of the app's jobs.

Upgrading from 8.3.0

First, update your app using UPM (the app manager built in to Confluence).

Important: updating to this app version will reset the schedules of the app jobs to their defaults! It is because in this release the app was converted from using Quartz-managed jobs to using modern Caesium-managed jobs. As Caesium does not transparently pick up the custom schedules configured for Quartz, schedules will reset to their defaults.

At the same time, the new default schedules for the app jobs are the same as the old default schedules.

Consequently:

1. If you have not changed the schedules of the app jobs, then there's nothing to do. (Jobs will be executed according to the default schedules, just like they did before the upgrade.)
2. If you have changed the schedules of the app jobs, then please re-apply those changes after upgrading. See the Confluence documentation about changing a job's schedule. It is simple and takes a minute. (If you forget this, jobs will be executed according to the default schedules instead of your custom schedules after the upgrade.)
   Since this is very unlikely that you changed the schedule of the 2 jobs named "Better Content Archiving: Persist the...", you should focus on these two jobs only:
   1. "Better Content Archiving: Analyze Content Quality"
   2. "Better Content Archiving: Find and Archive Expired Content"

8.3.0

This release introduces "quick actions" which significantly ease controlling the lifecycle of pages. "Quick actions" is a concept that we have been experimenting with for a couple of months, and now release it for the public to elevate the end-user experience to a new level.

Quick actions

To ease working with the lifecycle of a page, the app now offers so-called quick actions. Using these you can work in a friendly, controlled and less error-prone way. Quick actions are available to discuss, update, confirm, expire and archive pages with ease.

Learn more about quick actions (don't forget to watch the short tutorial video!).

Improvements

• User manual section of the "Move" strategy is rewritten with more details on copying and synchronizing ancestor pages.
• New user manual section added about the permissions required to restore pages.

Upgrading from 8.2.0

First, update your app using UPM (the app manager built in to Confluence).

Quick actions were added to the notification emails so that users can easily take actions directly from the email context. Therefore, the default notification email templates were updated in this app version. If you haven't customized the notification email templates (i.e. if you are using the defaults), then there is nothing else to do.

If you have made changes to those (adding instructions in the top is a very typical customization, for example), then you will need to migrate those customizations to the new templates.

Steps:

1. Copy the content of your current email template to a textfile old.txt. (It's a good idea to save it somewhere as a backup.)
2. Click Reset default under the email template. It will reset it to the new default (without your customizations).
3. Copy the content of this new default email template to another textfile new.txt.
4. Compare old.txt and new.txt, and merge all changes you made in the former to the latter. Use a visual merge tool (like WinMerge), and it will be trivial.
5. Copy the merged result back to Confluence and save it.
6. Repeat these steps for every notification template that you have customized.

8.2.0

This release comes with two valuable features frequently requested by the user community. Although both of these are useful for smaller Confluence instances, too, they are super-important for administrators of Confluence sites with many spaces and many users. Thanks to Dorothee, Katharina, Justin, Marti, Rodrigo for helping us with their requirements' details!

Default archiving configuration

This new global setting allows selecting an archiving configuration which will be automatically applied to every new space, right after the creation of the space. It is a time-saver for Confluence instances where new spaces are created all the time, but content quality still must be under control.

Learn more about selecting the default archiving configuration.

Trusted group

This setting can restrict those space administrators who can configure and run archiving. It gives more safety if you have lots of space administrators who may not be familiar with the Better Content Archiving app.

Learn more about configuring the trusted group.

Improvements

• The "archive" watermark is visible in all spaces with the "archived" status (not only in the spaces created by the Better Content Archiving app).
• When creating archive spaces, anonymous and "all authenticated users" type permissions are not copied.

Bugfixes

• Fixed: by manually rewriting the space key from "Foo" to "FOO" in the URL, it is possible to set an archiving config to the same space multiple times (leading to confusing display of the association).

Upgrading from 8.1.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.1.0

This release comes with a super-popular feature request implemented to protect personal information. Thanks to Enrico, Florian, Ganna, Karl, Katharina, Michael, Niko, Ralf for helping us with detailing their requirements!

Plus, most visibly, the app got a new name!

Bye-bye "Archiving Plugin for Confluence"! Hello "Better Content Archiving for Confluence"!

With this version we made a slight adjustment in the app's name, because the term "plugin" was replaced by Atlassian first with "add-on" and then with "app". We decided to completely remove this from the app's name.

You may still see the old name popping up here and there, until we roll out the change everywhere. Thanks for the patience!

Data privacy (for GDPR)

From this version, you can configure the visibility of the username of the last updater and last viewer. This feature was primarily requested by users in the EU region in order to protect personal information and comply with GDPR. We suggest reading our FAQ about data protection and GDPR in general.

This screenshot shows the configuration with the last viewer's identity hidden, but with the last updater shown:

It applies to all relevant screens in the Better Content Archiving app:

Learn more about configuring data privacy.

Upgrading from 8.0.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

8.0.0

As you probably know, Archiving Plugin already supports Confluence Data Center deployments (i.e. clustered Confluence). To be precise, those are supported since app version 7.0.0 (released in May 2017).

In 2018, Atlassian re-launched its Data Center program and introduced new development and testing criteria for "Data Center approved apps". This version is the official release for the revised program, tested to live up to the rigorous demands of Data Center environments.

Archiving Plugin is a Data Center approved app!

The followings have been done to comply with the revised development and testing requirements:

1. This version has been verified against the Atlassian's official Data Center technical checklist, which would identify potential non-cluster-safe parts in the app. All points are met.
2. This version has been performance-tested with the official Atlassian Performance Testing Library. For your interest, we used AWS infrastructure and "c3.xlarge" type standard EC2 instances for hosting the Confluence nodes. The testing confirmed that the app works correctly and consistently in clusters with 1, 2, 4 and 8 nodes (and anything in-between).
3. This version has been successfully tested with UPM 3.0, the new generation of the Universal Plugin Manager.

As a result, Archiving Plugin is a Data Center approved apps launch partner. The new program was announced at Atlassian Summit 2018 (3-5 September 2018, Barcelona).

Upgrading from 7.5.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

7.5.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 6.10.

Upgrading from 7.4.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

7.4.0

Page view initialization

As you probably know, Confluence does not implement any sort of page view tracking. Because the workflows implemented by Archiving Plugin heavily rely on the last page view information, the app implements its own real-time page view tracking mechanism. Even with this mechanism in place, there was a limitation that confused many in the past. We call it the "abandoned pages" problem.

This version introduces a new feature to solve this problem. While this is still impossible to find out what happened before the app's installation (building a time machine is really hard! :-)), you can sensibly initialize the last page view information when building or re-building the content event index!

You can use the strategies that fits your users' expectations the best:

Learn more about page view initialization.

Adding missing page views when updating existing installations to 7.4.0

After updating the app version, we encourage you to re-build your global Content Event Index and add the last page view information for the pages without that. You can use one of the following strategies:

1. Using the "the same as its last update" strategy: it sets the last view for abandoned pages the same as their last update. Please expect the consequences detailed in the next paragraph.
2. Using the "its last updater and a specific date" option with the current date: it sets the last view to today. It is the safest option with no immediate consequences. If the abandoned pages are continue to stay non-viewed, they will be reported after the page view alert interval.
3. Using the "its last updater and a specific date" option with a past date: by setting the last view to some user-given date it finds the abandoned pages faster. Please expect the consequences detailed in the next paragraph.

After you initialized the page view for abandoned pages (i.e. when all page has valid last view information), the app will start processing the pages it skipped previously. You can expect the following consequences:

1. The "not-viewed pages" counts in Content Quality Statistics may increase (with the count of the abadoned pages added).
2. The "not-viewed pages" lists in notification emails may be longer (with the abandoned pages added).
3. Most importantly: if you are using the "not viewed for N days" trigger for page archiving, it may trigger archiving for abandoned pages!

If you are worried about these, try the page view initialization feature in a staging system (that has a copy of your production data) first.

Overall, as these abandoned pages will now be precisely tracked and reported, you can take actions to make your content leaner and its quality even better.

Multiple supervisors per archiving configuration

Starting from this version, you can select multiple users as supervisors in any archiving configuration. (In previous versions, you could select only one.) This allows making more than one person responsible for the space, resulting in even better content quality.

Improvements

• Content Quality Statistics and Start Archiving screens give a clear error message when long-running tasks cannot be started due to missing actors (i.e. when the "confluence-administrator" groups that contains the super-user does not exist or does not contain at least one valid user account).
• Archiving configuration editor gives more intuitive validation messages (related to the page view- and update intervals for various triggers).
• User interface improvements: the term "actor" is more consistently used, the "archive space's status" selector is more intuitively explained.
• Content improvements on the built-in Getting Started page.

Upgrading from 7.3.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence). As a second step, add the missing page view information for the pages without that.

7.3.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 6.7.

Upgrading from 7.2.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

7.2.0

Distinct style for archive spaces

One of the user feedback we received time to time was that users unwantedly edited archive pages because they didn't realize that they are in an archive space's context. To address this, the app gives a clear, but non-obtrusive style to archive pages from this release. It includes a yellowish background color plus an expressive watermark. It is visible both on the wiki pages and in the space's administration screens to discourage "update" type operations.

Intelligent label filtering

Labels are used for various mechanisms in Confluence. From this version, when a page is moved or copied to the archive space, its labels are filtered to avoid unexpected behavior.

Improvements

• Notification email templates have access to the archiving configuration to enable more informative notifications
  • "Not-viewed pages" emails display the "page view alert limit"
  • "Expired pages" emails display the "page expiration alert limit"
• The Customizing notification emails page in the documentation was rewritten for clarity and with more examples

Bugfixes

• Fixed: Inline comments become regular page comments in the archive space
• Fixed: Favorite pages are listed twice in the favorites list (once from the fresh space and once from the archive space)
• Fixed: Page renaming unexpectedly updates the last update date of the linked pages (by intercepting the events triggered by "LINK_REFACTORING")
• Fixed: Incomplete page and attachment data causes "Cannot set non-null field UPDATE_DATE to null" error while re-building the content update index

Upgrading from 7.1.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

7.1.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 6.4.

Upgrading from 7.0.1

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

7.0.1

Bugfixes

• Fixed: "Data integrity error in migrated archiving configuration" error when upgrading to app version 7.0.0

Upgrading from 7.0.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

7.0.0

Support for Confluence Data Center (cluster)

We are happy to announce that this app version implements the long awaited support for Confluence Data Center deployments!

Over the last 10 months we put insane efforts to the 6.x releases (the grounding work) and to this new release, aiming to provide Content Lifecycle Management for Confluence clusters. 6.x allows to efficiently process millions of pages, while 7.x allows to do that over multiple Confluence nodes.

The video below gives a short introduction to running the app on a cluster of 3 Confluence nodes. We first start the Calculate Quality Statistics task on node 1, then demonstrate that its progress can also be watched on node 2 and node 3. At completion, the result becomes visible on all nodes with no latency. Overall, the user experience is 99% identical with the single-server user experience!

Without going much into technical details, here is some high level information about how Archiving Plugin works in a cluster.

Sharing data in a cluster

All persistent Archiving Plugin data is managed using the ActiveObjects technology (by Atlassian). It guarantees that all database-persisted data and all changes are transparently replicated among the cluster nodes. Archiving configurations are an example of database-persisted data.

For non-persistent data that need to be shared among cluster nodes, Archiving Plugin uses cluster-wide caches relying on the Cache 2 technology (by Atlassian). It guarantees that all cached data are replicated among the cluster-nodes in nearly real-time. Long-running task state (progress) is an example of non-persistent data.

Executing long-running tasks in a cluster

The app's long-running tasks (like the Content Quality Calculation or the Content Archiving task) are executed only on one node in the cluster, generating load only on that single node! At completion, Archiving Plugin makes sure that the task results are replicated to all other nodes. For instance, the refreshed Content Quality Statistics are immediately visible on all nodes.

The task parallelization strategy is simple: at any time, there can be max one task being executed in the whole cluster. In other words, there is simply no parallelization. When a node wants to execute a task, it needs to acquire a cluster-wide lock and then release that at completion. Until that lock is available again, no other task can be started on any other node. The idea is to save the cluster from synchronization issues and from unnecessary load. As long-running tasks complete fast since the 6.0.x versions of the app, this simple and robust strategy will not be a limiting factor for through-put.

While the actual task is executed on a single node, other nodes allow tracking its progress using so-called proxy tasks. A proxy task on its own node appears like the actual task running on another node, displaying the message, the progress and the result of that. From the user point of view, proxy tasks make transparent whether the task is actually running on the node the user is connected to or on some other node.

All in all, the new era of highly-available Content Lifecycle Management has started. Happy clustering!

Compatibility with Confluence 6.2

This version is also a compatibility release for Confluence 6.2.

Known issues reported to Atlassian

There are two pending issues at the time of the release, that we reported for Atlassian. These are affecting the Archiving Plugin in some negative way, but cannot be fixed in the app side (at least the probability that these can be improved in our side are low).

Therefore we encourage you to step in, vote for these issues, add your details as a comment and watch the issue for potential updates. (Our hope is that the increased importance leads for faster results from Atlassian.)

1. Mysterious "no row with the given identifier exists" errors when moving pages: CE-1044
2. Page moves are significantly slower (although stable!) in newer Confluence versions than in Confluence 5.7: CE-1045

Upgrading from 6.1.2

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence). Please note that after the upgrade you will have to recalculate the content quality statistics, because from this version those are now stored in a new "cluster-ready" database table.

6.1.2

Bugfixes

• Fixed: Page Status Indicator is displaying an error for previous page versions
• Fixed: The content of the Page Status Indicator overlay is "zoomed in" when the Comala Workflows app is installed

Upgrading from 6.1.1

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

6.1.1

Bugfixes

• Fixed: "Comparison method violates its general contract" errors in Confluence core when Archiving Plugin screens are accessed (reported to Atlassian as CONF-45910)
• Fixed: Page edits with "Notify watchers" unchecked (also known as "minor edits") do not refresh the page's Last Update date

Upgrading from 6.1.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

6.1.0

Performance, performance and more performance

In the previous app version (6.0.0), we introduced the so-called data limits to save your server from wasting computing resources (CPU, memory) on irrelevant data. In this version, we rebuilt the end of the data processing pipeline for even more performance and lower memory footprint. This enabled to significantly increase the defaults of the data limits, which are configurable now!

Data limit parameter	Default value
events.maxSpaces	1000
events.maxPagesPerSpace	200
notifications.maxSpaces	1000
notifications.maxPagesPerSpace	100000
emails.maxSpaces	200
emails.maxPagesPerSpace	100

Using these data limits, several thousand notification emails (for hundreds of spaces and several hundred thousand pages) were sent without problems in our internal load tests:

Bugfixes

• Fixed: Hibernate "owning session was closed" error while collecting the addressees for notification emails.
• Fixed: Empty page lists in content audit log events cause NPEs with Oracle.
• Fixed: Blacklist checking crashes on the spaces that have no description object associated with (i.e. their data is corrupt).
• Fixed: When all spaces are blacklisted, the Content Quality Stats screen misleadingly suggests that the system is in an unindexed state.

Breadcrumb style page lists removed

Breadcrumbs-style page lists in the notification emails are not supported anymore. You can't displays the ancestors of an expired page, like "grandparent > parent > actual page", only display the actual page. We did for two reasons. First: that's not the Confluence standard. Second: carrying all ancestors with the pages until the mail rendering logic generated extra complication (ancestors are lazy loaded Hibernate objects) and extra use of memory (ancestors are heavy weight), so we're keeping things simple, robust and scalable.

Upgrading from 6.0.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

6.0.0

This release introduces the next-generation app core, that was rebuilt from bottom to top, with scalability in mind.

More than 8 years ago, when we released the first version, we didn't expect the app to grow this popular. Today it improves the content quality for more than 500 production Confluence instances, from small instances to extremely large ones. When we say "extremely large", we mean Confluence instances with more than 1.5 million pages, containing individual spaces with more than 100,000 pages! (These are real-life examples we received from our largest customers.)

With proper tuning, previous app versions gave acceptable results even on this scale of data, but clearly there was room for improvement.

6.0.0 is our answer for scalability. (We put in countless weeks working on 6.0.0, and this is our biggest release since the inception.)

Apart from re-architecting many components under the hood and from a ton of smaller visible improvements, the app features work identically in pre-6.0.0 versions and 6.0.0. The latter will be, however, significantly faster in large Confluence instances:

• background tasks are completed in minutes instead of hours
• as background tasks are faster, you can execute them more frequently, therefore your statistics are more up-to-date
• memory requirements are lower
• database transactions are fewer and shorter

These changes allow scaling even to the magnitude of millions of pages!

Concept of the Content Update Index

The introduction of the Content Update Index is the single most important change in this release. Without going into details, the index maintains the last update information (who updated what, when?) in a scalable and searchable way, eliminating expensive page tree traversals.

Although the index does not require any manual care, you need to initialize that the first time, and may need to rebuild that eventually on the go.

Initializing the Content Update Index

The index must be initialized when the app is installed the first time, or when you upgrade to version 6.0.0. Until the content update index is built, the app functionality that relies on content updates will not work, for obvious reasons.

The initialization must be executed globally by a Confluence administrator:

1. Login to Confluence as administrator
2. Go to Administration → Content Quality
3. Click the Build now button

After the index is initialized, it will be automatically maintained in the background with "micro updates" that are triggered by page updates, attachment updates, and so on.

Rebuilding the Content Update Index

In some rare cases, you may want to rebuild the index. This can typically happen when you remove spaces from the blacklist (the index is not maintained for blacklisted spaces), or when you are experiencing troubles with the app features (potentially caused by index inconsistency).

You can rebuild the index both globally or for a single space, by clicking the Re-build content update index button in the Content Quality Statistics screen.

Data limiting

Starting from this release the app reduces the data to the "actionable" size. It both prevents your users from information overload and your system from wasting resources on useless work.

If, for example, you had 100,000 expired pages in 500 spaces, then your users may have received gigantic notification emails with super-long page lists previously. Not only those were unreadable, people just ignored them, due to the "where do I start fixing this?" problem.

In 6.0.0, although all the 500 spaces and 100,000 pages are processed, it will intelligently limit the notification emails to the first 20 spaces and to the first 20 pages per space, making it more actionable for the user. A similar mechanism is in place to guarantee that only 50 pages are stored per content audit log event.

Notification email changes

Along with other mechanism in the app, notification emails were re-engineered with large dataset in mind. Notable changes:

• Both the list of spaces and the list of pages per space are limited to the first N items.
  Previous app versions displayed the complete lists, which is not actionable (will you really update a list with a thousand expired pages?) and may result in multi-megabyte long emails (that may even break some email clients).
  The new approach is more manageable for the users and scales better for large amount of content.
• Page lists are sorted alpahbetically, not "by page tree".
  Previous app versions used complete space traversals to reconstruct the page tree for the emails. This was slow and did not scale well to large spaces.
• Breadcrumbs are turned off.
  In previous app versions, pages were displayed with the whole trail of their parent pages in the emails, like "Home Page → Finance Report → 2015 → Q1 → Sales". For a shorter list of pages, especially if they were organized into a logical page tree, it was great. For a longer list of pages, it made the list harder to read, plus it does not follow the convention how the Confluence interface displays page lists in general.
  Therefore we decided to turn this off for a better default setting, but you can turn this on by setting this variable to true in each email template:

  ## expired-pages-notification.vm
  #set($showParentPages = false)  ## whether to display the parents, grandparents, etc. of each page
  

Performance

Performance in this case is a function of several different parameters (and your mileage may vary!), but let us give you some rough results from our load testing environment. Please note that the environment we chose is relatively modern and powerful, but this is deliberately not a high-end server. Our goal was to stay close to or even "below" reality.

Our environment:

• "Hardware": m4.large instance on AWS EC2 (2 CPU, 8G RAM, SSD storage)
• Operating system: Linux (Ubuntu Server 14.04)
• Confluence versions: 5.7 and 5.10
• Database: MySQL 5.6
• JVM tuning: we were only experimenting with heap sizes 1000M, 1500M and 3000M, all other JVM settings are Confluence defaults

Our results: (you can get different numbers in your environment!)

Operation	1.014M pages in Confluence 5.7.6	380K pages in Confluence 5.10.1
Content update indexing	25 mins	7 mins
Content quality recalculation	1 hour	6 mins
Page view tracking	16 minutes (for 175K not viewed pages)	5:30 minutes (for 160K not viewed pages)
Page expiration tracking	25:30 minutes (for 453K expired pages)	8:20 minutes (for 380K expired pages)
Page archiving with MOVE	40 minutes (for 1555 pages)	1.1 hours (for 400 pages - stable, but slower!)
Page archiving with COPY	53 minutes (for 1555 pages)	1.5 hours (for 1601 pages)
Page archiving with TRASH	1 minute (for 1555 pages)	35 seconds (for 2801 pages)

Bugfixes

• In previous versions, no pages found to archive if the archiving configuration specified the "AND" operator between the Page Archiving triggers "Not viewed for N days" and "Not updated for M days", and one of those were disabled.
  This was a major bug (reported by a user in Italy, thanks!) with a simple workaround: turn the operator to "OR" and it will work as expected. Ultimately, 6.0.0 fixes this.
• The Content Tools → Page Status is now hidden for regular users.
  It was previously shown, but required space administration permissions to access. Note: we consider making this accessible by regular users in a future app version, but for now we just made the UI less misleading.
• Manage blacklisted spaces link is only displayed for Confluence administrators even in space context.

Performance tuning guide

Our new performance tuning guide gives you simple to execute instructions to run the app efficiently even in super-large environments.

Data Center compatibility comes soon!

This is important to note that 6.0.0 is also the "groundwork release" for Data Center compatibility. Confluence Data Center support is our most popular feature request at the moment, which requires many of the changes introduced by this new app core, therefore 6.0.0 is a sort of prerequisite for that.

Upgrading from 5.3.0

Steps:

1. Upgrade the app JAR as usual, through the Universal Plugin Manager.
2. Then reset each notification emails to the factory default, due to the email template changes mentioned above.

Upgrading to this version is recommended if your Confluence is larger than 30 spaces and 1500 pages.

5.3.0

This version focuses on improving the integration with various space themes. By introducing the Brikit Theme Press support, Archiving Plugin now supports all major Confluence themes, including built-in types and the types provided by 3rd party apps.

Support for Brikit Theme Press 2.0.2

Starting from this version, you can use the Archiving Plugin also in the spaces relying on the popular Brikit Theme Press app.

Updated from Bitvoodoo Enterprise Theme 5.1.2

We updated this integration to the latest Enterprise Theme app version:

1. Fixed: Page Status Indicator is not visible
2. Fixed: "Archiving" tab in Space Tools is duplicated

Compatibility tested with Refined Theme 5.1.3 and Scroll Versions 3.3.2

We also verified the Archiving Plugin working correctly with these two popular theme apps. (OK, Scroll Versions is not a theme app by design, but this also introduces its own theme.)

Upgrading from 5.2.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

5.2.0

This version is a compatibility release for Confluence 6 with additional minor bugfixes.

Differences due to collaborative editing

Confluence 6 introduced collaborative editing. The only difference it means for the Archiving Plugin is that any "partial page update" will update the last update timestamp of the edited page. In other words, when any of the users editing the same page at the same time saves his/her "partial" changes, that will make the page current. From that point, everything works just as in previous app versions.

Bugfixes

• Fixed: Page titles in page lists (like "expired pages") overlap with the page icons
• Fixed: When archiving page comments, certain "mentions" result in unwanted mail notifications
• Fixed: "Archiving" and "Archiving configuration" tabs are displayed in archive spaces

Upgrading from 5.1.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

5.1.0

Archiving strategies

Starting from this release, there are 3 ways to archive pages:

1. Move them to an archive space ("Move" strategy),
2. Copy them to an archive space and delete them in the fresh space ("Copy and Trash" strategy)
3. Or just delete them in their original space ("Trash" strategy)

Each of these have their own merits, but "Move" is the new default, as it fits the most use cases the best.

"Move" implements the most requested feature to preserve the full version history for archived pages. Thanks for everyone asking for this, we appreciate your patience and your help in finding the perfect roadmap for the app! Keep it comin'!

After upgrading to this version, consider switching existing archiving configurations to "Move" (guide).

Performance improvements in archiving

The archiving logic used in previous app versions is now called "Copy and Trash". Even this strategy is faster than it was before, but "Move" is faster in most circumstances and "Trash" is blazingly fast.

Upgrading from 5.0.1

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

5.0.0

Blacklisted spaces

Turn off the Archiving Plugin for those spaces that are not relevant or have corrupt data, to improve the app performance and stability.

Support for the Scroll Versions Theme and the Bitvoodoo Enterprise Theme

This release adds official support for two highly popular 3rd party space themes.

Upgrading from 4.5.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

4.5.0

Customizable notification emails

The content of all 4 notification emails types (non-viewed pages, expired pages, archived pages, skipped pages) are editable via a web based editor. In previous versions, you could edit the templates by exploding the app JAR, but localization, adding your own content is now super easy.

Automatic archiving on a specific date

Just add the label "archive-15/12/1" and the page (plus its descendants) will be automatically archived on 1 Dec 2015. It couldn't be more fire-and-forget. Use it carefully, and make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot.

Upgrading from 4.4.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

4.4.0

Bulk-apply archiving configurations to spaces

A new screen, available using the "Spaces" link from the "Global Configurations" screen, allows quickly applying a global configuration to multiple spaces in one go. This is a huge time saver if you have a large number of spaces.

(This was the most popular feature request at the time. We take your feedback seriously, thanks!)

This release also features some bugfixes, most importantly a fix for an infamous Java 7/8 incompatibility problem.

Upgrading from 4.3.1

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

4.3.0

Page status browser

Conveniently browse through the pages in a space, with their real-time status, last update dates, last view dates displayed.

Page status indicator

Page status is also shown in the top-left corner of the content pane.

"Archive" quick-action in notification emails

Adding the "archive this page" label is now available in the notification emails! While looking at the list of expired pages, you can update or archive them with a single click.

Trigger precedence changed

The evaluation order of the archiving sub-triggers is now more intuitive. Recommendation: review your archiving configurations that use all the 3 sub-triggers!

REST API

Although the primary aim of the new API is to provide back-end for the app's own user-interface, you are also welcome to use it for your reporting and integration purposes.

Upgrading from 4.2.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

4.2.0

Confluence 5.7 compatibility

This is primarily a compatibility release with no major changes in features.

Upgrading from 4.1.2

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

4.1.0

New trigger: Archive page if not viewed in last N days

You can flexibly combine this new trigger with others, like "and if it has not been updated in the last Z days or has been labelled with 'archive'".

"Pages not viewed recently" list displayed instantly

The count of "pages not viewed recently" is now displayed in the Content Quality Statistics table, and it contributes to the overall quality metric. Click that link to view the exact page list.

Space and page archiving is more robust

The rewritten code is more fault tolerant and handles concurrency better.

No email noise

No unwanted notification emails are sent at page archiving (creations, deletions), comments, attachment or mentions.

Many-many smaller improvements

Numerous fixes and changes were made on the UI (ex: convenience links, hiding the archiving functionality for archive spaces), on Internet Explorer compatibility (ex: non-clickable buttons) or in the internals (ex: improved logging).

Upgrading from 4.0.2

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

4.0.0

New configure archiving interface

In 4.0.0, the new configuration experience is based around the concept of triggers ("if a page is older than 10 days" or "if a page labelled with 'foo'"...) and actions (...then "notify its last modifier"), allowing fine-grained settings and eliminating confusion. The rules of "who receives what email" are 100% configurable.

Supervisors

To send notifications to users that are not "directly" related to the content (not authors, etc.), configure so-called supervisors. To route all notifications to a single external mailbox, just set up a Confluence user with that email address and select that as supervisor.

Selectable archiver user

Previously, archiving operations (like copying and deleting pages) were executed by a user account automatically selected by the app. It lead to some misunderstanding.

The archiver user can now be manually picked. Tip: set up an intuitively named user account (ex: "Wiki Archiver") for that.

...oh, did you see our new docs?

Upgrading from 3.5.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

3.5.0

Confluence 5.5 compatibility

This release is updated for the Confluence 5.5 line. In addition, some minor internal glitches were also fixed.

Upgrading from 3.4.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

3.4.0

Page view tracking fixed for large spaces under MS SQL

This version is a maintenance release, that fixes a problem with the "page view tracking" feature, when used with MS SQL on very large spaces.

Upgrading from 3.3.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

3.3.0

Page expiration on a specific date

To satisfy the most popular feature request, page expiration is now also checked against specific dates, not only against periods starting from the last update.

Just add the tag "expire-14/2/25" and you will be notified when the page expires on 25 February 2014. It is supported for single pages and page tree as well, and integrates seamlessly with the other features (statistics, event streams, notifications).

Upgrading from 3.2.2

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

3.2.0

Update for RefinedWiki Original Theme

Archiving Plugin now also supports the slightly modified Space Administration interface introduced by RefinedWiki Original Theme, one of the most popular custom theme apps for Confluence.

Upgrading from 3.1.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

3.1.0

Confluence 5.3 compatibility

This release is updated for the Confluence 5.3 line.

Upgrading from 3.0.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

3.0.0

Page view tracking

This app version introduces a new feature called page view tracking to find those Confluence pages that were not viewed by anybody for a period of time. Discover both outdated (not edited by anyone) and irrelevant (not viewed by anyone) wiki content. Archive that easily to prevent efficiency, productivity and consistency problems.

Upgrading from 2.3.0

Just update your app version using UPM (Universal Plugin Manager, the app manager built in to Confluence).

Older releases

Regarding older releases please contact us. We are happy to provide you both with the apps and the corresponding upgrade instructions.