Getting error:"Unable to communicate with server. Saving is not possible at the moment."in

shiva pandey October 4, 2016

Hi ,

Whenever I am trying to create a new page in an existing space I am getting error :  "Unable to communicate with server. Saving is not possible at the moment.". Any help would be appreciated.

errorPage.PNG

37 answers

17 votes
Jonathan December 6, 2016

I think I've fixed the issue by turning off Collaborative editing and Synchrony. I was noticing the drafting system having trouble, and taking a very long time before it was 'ready'.

Confluence administration > General Configuration > Under 'Administration' > Collaborative Editing

Aylin Kohls
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January 4, 2017

It seems that when time of response are not good, save not works under collaborative editing.

I turned off the feature and it worked!! thanks Jonathan!!!

Like # people like this
gchaney January 8, 2017

I turned off just the plugin for Collaborative Editing.  I didn't see a separate setting for "Collaborative Editing"

Matt Drane January 10, 2017

We had the same issue but turning off Collaborative Editing solved the issue.

Chris Dahlem January 10, 2017

Thanks. Disabling Callobrative Editing has fixed the issue. Appears to be a problem with Confluence 6.0.3 though!

C. M. W. February 1, 2017

Plus one on that work around

Leticia December 20, 2017

I tried to find this fix in Confluence cloud but the pathway doesn't exist.

 

Is there another way to solve it for that instance?

Like Robert Wensley likes this
Adrian Wyssmann February 23, 2018

Any idea how to fix this but keep collaborative editing on?

Like # people like this
Evy Lizárraga August 21, 2018

Any answer for this? I'd like to use Collaborative Editing as well. 

florianeichin September 17, 2018

I have the same problem - are there any further help?

Franko Ivasic July 5, 2020

I had the same problem, disabling and enabling "Collaborative Editing" fixed the problem. Thanks.

Wayne Stanar September 10, 2020

yep same here and turning collab editing fixed it so still a thing ya

Andre dharmawan June 19, 2021

Becareful when you turned off "Collaborative Editing" it can create error page like this and even after you enabled it again this error page still persist in another page.

do_dang_quan August 4, 2022

Thank Jonathan

11 votes
Martin Maat February 9, 2018

It turned out I was using emojis. In particular a hand that indicates a hands-on action to be performed: 👉

It is a plain valid Unicode character which gets displayed perfectly in draft mode. Yet it inhibits the page from being published, with the known misleading error.

Kurt Dodrill April 23, 2018

Removing a single smiley face emoji we had on a page solved this issue for us. Thanks.

Like # people like this
flexdanmark May 31, 2018

In an expand-field in a page edit, we removed a smiley, and that fiexed it for us. :-) Thanks for the hint.

TimC October 25, 2018

Bingo. Same issue here. 

Rob Donoghue April 1, 2019

Fixed it for me, thank you. 

marcelpallares April 2, 2019

The same here! Thank you :) 

Adriano Pagano October 14, 2019

Same here! Thx a lot

Jacoline Melis February 12, 2020

|Thanx!

Like Martin Maat likes this
Casten Riepling October 27, 2020

In my case, a unicode up arrow caused the issue.  Specifically this: 

4 votes
Chander Inguva
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December 8, 2016

For some reason, i see same issue in Confluence 5.10.7 Server 

3 votes
Chris Zach December 20, 2016

I don't have an answer, but here's what I'm seeing for symptoms, which agree with comments on this page from others.

  • Using Confluence Cloud.
  • Error occurs in Chrome, but not in Safari.
  • Error occurs on page with the % character.

Is there a JIRA ticket filed yet?

 

Bruce Cannon December 20, 2016

I filed an issue for Cloud, they say it got fixed.  % doesn't break for my pages anymore.  And I think they must have fixed for Server too, because I can now type it into this box!  If you are on Server and still have the issue, I think you should open a new ticket.  Here is the ticket I filed https://support.atlassian.com/servicedesk/agent/JST/issue/JST-242800 

Adam Norgaard December 22, 2016

Can confirm that this has been resolved on the Cloud version of confluence and Jira.  I can now edit these pages with the percent sign.  It only affected Chrome.

Bruce Cannon December 22, 2016

This problem is back for me on Cloud.  However I recently installed a beta version of Chrome (Canary) so this may be related.

Chris Zach January 5, 2017

Closing the loop: The problem for me was caused by the interaction with the LastPass Chrome extension. Not sure what the long-term resolution will be yet.

Like Senthil Subramanian likes this
Josh Ramos January 5, 2017

I can confirm. Lastpass is causing this error for me as well. I was able to disable the extension and after I was able to save a page.

 

Any update on a resolution for this? This has only just recently started happening. 

Roya Elison January 6, 2017

I'm having the same issue using Chrome and LassPass plugin. I filed a ticket with LastPass. They suggested updating the Autofill settings, but I have yet to get it working. 

https://lastpass.com/support.php?cmd=showfaq&id=8956

 

S Hoover November 2, 2017

Thanks for this thread for pointing me in the right direction. I had this symptom for a similar but not specifically identical reason.

  • Firefox 56.0.2
  • Confluence 6.0.6 on-prem (managed by us, not by Atlassian)
  • Not using LastPass on my client side
  • Not sure whether HipChat plugin is enabled on server side

In my case, there were no percent characters in the text. However, I had copied and pasted from an email from MS Outlook that contained two smile emojis. Suspecting those, I deleted just the two emojis and I was able to save my page.

Conclusion: Confluence hates special characters.

Kelly Arrey
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January 19, 2018

One of our users just encountered this, it turned out to be because he tried to save a page which included an emoji.

2 votes
Barbara Bazemore Kiszka January 10, 2018

I saw this error repeatedly when saving one particular page. When editing the characters "->" changed to a new special symbol. After I removed the symbol the page saved successfully.

I agree with @S Hoover above, Confluence does not like special characters.

1 vote
Jonathan Baudouin January 12, 2021

I had the same problem "Unable to communicate with server" (in French : "Impossible de communiquer avec le serveur. Impossible d'enregistrer pour le moment."because of a f****** emoji in the page !

Actually this message seem to be shown when an error 500 occur, which is not very accurate....

Atlassian guys could manage properly emoji erros !

1 vote
Vincent T November 24, 2019

We are now end of 2019 and this problem still does occure on a fresh free cloud instance..

Come on Atlassian...

1 vote
M_D_ Klapwijk March 30, 2018

On Confluence 6.8.0 problems saving large tables generated in confluence markup. Disabling 'Confluence Hipchat Plugin' seems to be still the working solution. 

1 vote
Mike_Hamilton October 19, 2017

If you have the add-on "Adaptavist Selectacular", disable it. This fixed it for me after upgrading from 5.9 to 6.3.4

Austin Smith October 10, 2018

disabling this plugin fixed for me as well!

1 vote
Benjamin Saberin October 15, 2016

EDIT: After a day, the issue popped up again.  I dug through the logs and saw an odd HipChat plugin error.  After disabling all the HipChat addons, 5.10.6 works for us.  I'm assuming this was the original issue.


I experienced this issue with Confluence Server version 5.10.7.  "Upgrading' to 5.10.6 resolved the issue for me.

My application Server is Linux.  DB Server is MS SQL 2012.

Symptoms: After upgrading to 5.10.7 I saw the error above (and many other errors) whenever attempting to Save or Import.  The drafts were saved to the DB (I found this by querying SQL directly).  I also had odd and frequent heartbeat errors.  

Solution: I downloaded 5.10.6 and installed it as an upgrade.  The problem immediately resolved itself.

Note: This was the second major issue I had with 5.10.7.  Last night I installed it and the upgrade corrupted my DB.  I restored the Application Server from a snapshot, and the DB from a backup.  Today I ran the installation again and thought things went well (everything seemed to work, but saving failed).

Conclusion: I suspect there are problems with https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/downloads/binary/atlassian-confluence-5.10.7-x64.bin

 

david weng2 October 19, 2016

Indeed, disabling  HipChat  add-ons solved my problem.!!

Benjamin Saberin October 19, 2016

I'm very glad it helped!

I found this especially frustrating because we do not use HipChat integration with Confluence (we for Jira).

Are you running 5.10.7 or 5.10.6?  I want to upgrade to 5.10.7 this weekend if all I need to do is disable HipChat add-ons.

david weng October 19, 2016

Hey, We're running 5.10.7.

It seems that the HipChat integration plugins caused this problem.

 

PS i needed to create a second account since i already posted twice in 24 hours lol...

 

Anyways thank you for the solution, helped me a lot smile 

Jiraconfluence Solutionmgm sIT November 16, 2016

Same Error in 6.0.1 - HipChat Plugins are OFF and it still does not want to save some pages.

Contribyte Atlassian November 22, 2016

I have several different instances of 6.0.1. All of the are suffering on this problem.

David November 27, 2016

Same as Jiraconfluence Solutionmgm sIT. How did you solve your problem ?

 

 

Help Desk December 2, 2016

Spanking new install with this same problem.

Thomas Gorence December 8, 2016

Same issue here, seemed to have started with an update to 6.0.1

Bruce Cannon December 8, 2016

I am experiencing this same problem.  

  1. When I try to enter edit mode for any page, instantly get  "taking longer than usual, try reloading the page."  
  2. If I wait, it never loads.  
  3. If I reload, get page in edit mode.  
  4. But cannot save changes; get an endlessly repeating cycle of first "unable to communicate with server" followed after a few seconds by "you're back in business".
  5. If I hit Update, this process repeats.  Forever.  
  6. After experimenting with this whole cycle a few times, I get "Something went wrong after loading the editor. Copy your unsaved changes and refresh the page to keep editing."  

Am on Cloud.

Bruce Cannon December 8, 2016

I don't know if I have found the smoking gun for others, or a bug isolated to my instance, or my browser, or what...

But here's what I found after a few hours of trying to track down the source of the problem (why are some pages editable, while others are not?  Is there markup, invisible codes, or table, macros, or even visible characters that are causing problems?) 

Eventually I found something inexplicable.  Any page I eliminate the percent character from becomes savable again!  And am able to isolate it and reproduce it too.  All the pages which were saved, but when edited become unsavable, I have been able to recover by editing out that character. 

Even stranger, I can create a new blank page, title it "Test" or whatever, and put no characters on the page other than the percent character, and it will not save.  I can even create a new page, with zero characters on it, title the page with the percent character, and it won't save.

How weird is that?  Can someone else with this problem try it and report back?

Edit: I don't know if this is a clue that what I am seeing is browser related, or a clue that it is a Confluence bug and Atlassian Answers is built on Confluence, but:  I originally wrote this note with "the percent character" replaced with the percent character itself, and this comment would not post!

Olly December 9, 2016

Bruce - you're right, i can't save pages with the percentage character in them.

This is in Confluence 5.10.1.

Anyone know if a later version fixes this?

Bruce Cannon December 9, 2016

Hi Oliver:

I was excited that we had confirmed that it was a Confluence issue, so could pass to Atlassian for solving.

But before I opened a support request I tried it in Safari.  Unfortunately, pages open, edit and save fine in Safari, with the percent character.  

Then when I go back to Chrome, and try and edit that page into which I had inserted the percent character, it fails again.

So now what does this mean?  Where does the problem lie?

Bruce

Dan Rumney December 9, 2016

I see this also... it's worth noting that it's not just content that can contain percent characters... some macros will also contain them (like Section macros).

I also saw this when I had a Table layout set to "Responsive". I couldn't save it until I set it to "Fixed width"... probably a percent CSS setting or something.

Thanks for the Safari tip.

Dan Rumney December 9, 2016

And it turns out that the problems exists here too! Can't use the actual percent character.

Dan Rumney December 9, 2016

I dug further.

3 users, all with the same version of Chrome: A, B, C

A is an admin and sees this issue
B is an admin and does not see this issue
C is not an admin and does not see this issue.

When I compare the HTML source of these three users all editing the same page, I obviously see diffs. When you remove the admin related diffs, the timestamp/key related diffs and the user name related diffs, something stood out:

Issue seen:

<meta name="ajs-discovered-plugin-features" content="{&quot;com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-jira-metadata&quot;:[&quot;linked-issues-dropdown&quot;,&quot;inline-tasks-flag&quot;],&quot;com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-dashboard&quot;:[&quot;dialog&quot;,&quot;tour-step-sidebar&quot;,&quot;transition-saved-for-later&quot;,&quot;tips&quot;],&quot;com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-hipchat-integration-plugin&quot;:[&quot;hipChatServerIntegration&quot;]}">

Issue not seen:

<meta name="ajs-discovered-plugin-features" content="{&quot;com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-jira-metadata&quot;:[&quot;linked-issues-dropdown&quot;],&quot;com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-hipchat-integration-plugin&quot;:[&quot;hipChatServerIntegration&quot;]}">

Of course, it could be other things, but that's what I am seeing

 

Dan Rumney December 9, 2016

That, and in the failing instance, I see

 data-base-url=&quoquot;https://confluence.example.com/confluence&quot;

in the TinyMCE textarea and I don't see that in the working instances

Adam Norgaard December 15, 2016

Confirmed issue with the percent sign in confluence and JIRA using Chrome.  It just will not save.

Olly January 3, 2017

Disabling lastpass (or going into incognito mode) fixes the issue for me.

Dan Rumney January 3, 2017

I checked and confirmed that I see the same behaviour - seems to be some kind of interaction with LastPass

Brian Jester January 3, 2017

Thank you Oliver and Dan for finding the LastPass connection!

Bruce Cannon January 3, 2017

Great find!  Over in the LastPass forums much discussion on the discovery that disabling the LastPass chrome extension is the only way to get Google Inbox to send messages.  

So Lastpass+Confluence is apparently not an isolated interaction but a more general disruption by that extension.  

I'm still puzzled about the interaction between LastPass and percent signs in Confluence though.  I should check to see if mail that doesn't send has a percent sign in it smile 

0 votes
Lukas Griesbrock November 5, 2020

The problem occurred with us due to a certificate exchange.
The solution was to import it into the Java Trusted Store. After that everything worked again.

0 votes
Milo Grika August 13, 2020

After testing all the things listed here, in the end it was a macro (specifically the Box macro) that had gone wonky. Deleted it, and re-added it and Publishing worked.

0 votes
Frank February 16, 2020

In my case a page containing

𝛿

could not be saved.

0 votes
Teja December 9, 2019

This is occurring in Confluence 7.1.0 version.

How can we solve the problem with Collaborative Editing "on"?

It was working absolutely fine with Confluence 6.9.1 version. 

Teja December 10, 2019

We are able to solve the issue with  Collaborative Editing "on".

By adding below option in Java Options

 -Dsynchrony.enable.xhr.fallback=true 
0 votes
Kemal Tuncelli November 6, 2019

We are using Confluence DataCenter 6.13.7 and also facing the same issue

0 votes
Alex_Fischels May 11, 2019

I know this is an older thread, but I found that emojis also cause this to happen. Remove the Emoji and it may actually save. 

I say this because I had tried everything else, even with synchrony off. 

0 votes
DKB Service GmbH May 9, 2019

iss there a solution? wa are running conf 6.6.0 and 6.13.4. in booth versions we get this error.

deaktivate Collaborative Editing ist not a solution for us...

0 votes
Rethabile Morena June 12, 2018

Our users tend to receive a 'Unable to communicate with server' error, and based on the articles we need to switch off collaborative editing.

We would like a solution with Collaborative Editing on. We have a huge user-base and found that when switched off, it caused too many issues where users saved and published work, but when in view mode the content had not updated.

Barbara Bazemore Kiszka June 12, 2018

Did you try looking for unusual characters on the page and removing them before saving? Unusual characters include emoticons, fancy bullets, and in my case --> got turned into one character.

Like Jacoline Melis likes this
0 votes
Deleted user April 30, 2018

I'm also very interessted in finding a solution with Collaborativ Editing "on". It's a great feature and our users love it. But "Communication-Problems" are still frustrating. 

The only workaround for us, currently working after getting the error message:

- Close Page 

- Question for delete or save draft => Save Draft

- Open Edit-Mode again and save. 

Till now it worked good, but its not a very nice workaround.

(Local Server Confluence 6.8.1)

0 votes
Bronson Petterson April 11, 2018

Turning off Collaborative Editing worked for us as well, "Local Server Confluence 6.8.1"

0 votes
tracy grygiel February 7, 2017

I'm experiencing the same problem in IE 11.  I'm running Confluence on their cloud (hosted).  I am trying out different wikis for my company and if this doesn't resolve, I'll have to go to another solution. It worked well for me at another organization.  I haven't heard back from them at all (disappointing).  sad 

0 votes
Lisa Gordon February 1, 2017

I see it with 5.10.8.  I use Chrome.  I frequently also have errors about having a saved draft to merge even though I can see my previous save was ok.  Anyone else see that issue?

0 votes
alertdriving January 13, 2017

I'm getting the same problem ever since I upgraded to 6.0.3

With Collaborative Editing ON

  • error when trying to save "Unable to communicate with server.  Saving is not possible at the moment"

With Collaborative Editing LIMITED

  • cannot move existing pages
  • cannot rename existing pages
  • cannot make inline comments

 

I just tried disabling the HipChat plugins as others have suggested, but that doesn't seem to have any effect.

At the moment, I am having to flip the Collaborative Editing setting back and forth just so our users can do the work they need. 

 

 

Froilan

 

 

0 votes
Daniel Guidry January 10, 2017

I just upgraded from 5.9.4 to 6.0.3 today and we began seeing this exact issue. I disabled the collaborative editing function as some other posters did and it resolved the problem.  Looks like an issue there that Atlassian will need to sort out for the next update.

Yves SAMEN March 3, 2017

It worked for me. Hope we'll have an update from @atlassian-consulting@e-core.com very soon

0 votes
Craig Brand January 10, 2017

We've upgraded to V 6.0.3 today and this is happening to us. Grrrr!

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