"What?s New in Confluence..." popup blank in FF
Asked by Sam Hall:

For somereason I can't figure out, the "What's New in Confluence..." popup tries to request HTTP version of the page which then redirects to HTTPS. By default Firefox blocks the HTTP request since our wiki is using SSL, so the user isn't seeing the content at all. This is happening in our environment both with version 5.1.5 and 5.2.5. Is there something I'm doing wrong?


Answers:
author: Sam Hall
body: It works, thanks for putting me on the right track Kai. Just did a global replace in help-paths.properties file for "=" with "=confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF53/" and then customised the whats new entries to:

```
help.whats.new.iframe.link=www.atlassian.com/en/software/confluence/whats-new-iframe/53help.whats.new.full.link=www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/whats-new.jsp
```

E.g. the top of my help-paths.properties file looks like this (note I decided to skip straight to [confluence.atlassian.com](http://confluence.atlassian.com) and avoid [docs.atlassian.com](http://docs.atlassian.com) altogether)...

```
help.prefix=https://{1}## Page Nameshelp.creating.content=confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF53/Creating+Contenthelp.content.report.table.macro=confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF53/Content+Report+Table+Macro
...
```

comments: author: Sam Hall
body: One caveat I've noticed is that it breaks the "Online Help" link, which changes to [https://getting+help+and+support](https://getting+help+and+support.). There doesn't seem to be an entry for this page anywhere in help-paths.properties. I tried to track down what generates the link in the vm templates and hit a reference to aui.page.header.soy which I imagine must be in a jar file somewhere. I think I'll just hack it with some javascript.


author: Sam Hall
body: A grep on the source revealed that I needed to add this entry too...

```
urlsuffix.help.page=confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF53/getting+help+and+support
```


author: Kai Gottschalk
body: Hi Sam,

congrats to this teamwork. With your documented information we were able to fix both challenges.

To say this quite clear: Although being a huge atlassian fan, I'd like to point out that this mixed-content-problem took us more than two mandays (!) just because of one (!) missing "s" in the link (http instead of https). This makes me think twice considering further updates. Shame on this broken process!

Cheers  
Kai


author: Sam Hall
body: Well, I think this is the first Confluence bug report I've ever made that got promoted to Major and though it doesn't make sense to me why it's not caused issues for clients and got more votes. I'm sure they'll fix it one day. I can only postulate that most clients that care about security and use SSL disable "What's New" for security reasons.

Thanks for spending some time on it. I reluctantly just disabled "What's New" due to this issue. Now I can reenable it on our 5.3 upgrade with this - really flakey - workaround. I can't understand why it's so hard for someone to fix the silly redirect from <https://docs.atlassian.com> to <http://www.atlassian.com> and then finally to <https://www.atlassian.com> for the what's new thingy. Though who knows, behind the scenes they might have their reasons.


author: Kai Gottschalk
body: Just a short comment/hint from our side, how we solved this annoying challenge quite easy - and not yet documented:

1.) Create new/empty file "help-paths.properties" in directory .../WEB-INF/classes/ (!)

2.) Enter following content in the file:
> help.prefix=https://docs.atlassian.com/confluence/docs-53/whatsnew/iframe?e=Y2FybG8uaG9oZW5icmlua0B4aW5nLmNvbQ%3D%3D\&od=false\&a=true  
> help.whats.new.iframe.link=whatsnew

3.) Save file

4.) Restart Confluence

Done! This helps a lot as you do not have to search and extract within/from the JAR-file (the file "help-paths.properties" was not present in our installation.

Hope this helps you!

Cheers  
Kai

comments: author: Sam Hall
body: I'll try this, but I'm concerned that this will break all other "Help" links throughout the system.


author: Sam Hall
body: I've updated my question because I noticed I had the wrong redirected URLs (must have failed to copy/paste correctly). The problem is it redirects to <http://www.atlassian.com>... before finally redirecting to <https://www.atlassian.com>...

I've tried a variation of your workaround to land directly on the final destination page, and now "What's New" works perfectly, however any other links to Confluence Help are broken.

You've given me an idea though, perhaps I could set the prefix to simply "https://" and then put the full path including the domain in for every entry in the packaged help-paths.properties file.


author: AKASH BHARDWAJ
body: I have placed this Help-paths.properties file under WEB-INF/CLASSES folder but still when my site is up i am not able to see anything. I have inspected the frame and it shows Url is pointing to null.

So any help....


author: Sam Hall
body: Read and understand this first... <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Local+Confluence+Documentation>


author: Sam Hall
body: So I found the documentation regarding extracting help-paths.properties into confluence/WEB-INF/classes/ in order to amend the help documentation path. This allows me to specify:

help.prefix=https://docs.atlassian.com/confluence/docs-{0}/{1}

Unfortunatly, the atlassian hosted "What's New" page redirects to an http URL that still causes errors...

<https://docs.atlassian.com/confluence/docs-52/whatsnew/iframe>

redirects to...

<http://www.atlassian.com/en/software/confluence/whats-new-iframe/52>

which redirects to the SSL version...

<https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/confluence/whats-new-iframe/52>

This is mental and very frustraiting!

Update: I've logged a bug report for this here so I can close this question and stopped getting spammed by the "Open question reminder"... <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-31065>


Tags: confluence-administration