A hack for Confluence

I shared this with my colleagues a while back, so it might be old news to some.

Problem

My team has used Confluence for their internal documentation. It’s okay, but some things about it are rough.

By default, Confluence uses a page title (pretty) URL format like https://confluence.myorganization/display/space/Early+2022+Change+Log. This means if someone changes the page title, old links people have shared to the page will be broken. This happens a lot in my world.

However, if a page title contains one of these special characters % & ? / \ ; ” § +, Confluence displays a URL by Page ID, which is persistent.

Solutions Confluence would have to implement

  1. Make the browser display the page ID instead of the page title in the address bar.
  2. Offer a setting to default to either page title or ID in URLs

DIY hacky solution


When I make a new Confluence page, I put a ; at the end of the page title, forcing Confluence to display the Page ID (instead of the page title) in the address bar.

I am both proud and ashamed of this.