Symptoms

• Drafts is not working at all
• Affect all users
• Affect all Confluence new and existing contents
• Nothing related in the atlassian-confluence.log

• While editing or creating a page, monitor the http activity through Chrome's developer tools or Firefox's firebug network panel, after certain intervals (the Draft Save Interval set in Confluence Admin >> General Configuration), the following requests are triggered:

  URL	HTTP Request Method	Triggered?	Remarks
  http://Confluence-URL/rest/tinymce/1/drafts	POST	No	If you don't see this triggered at all, then this is the right KB for you
  http://Confluence-URL/json/startheartbeatactivity.action	POST	Yes
  http://Confluence-URL/rest/mywork/latest/status/notification/count	GET	Yes	This only applies for Confluence 4.3 or higher

Cause

There is a system plugin in Confluence which is disabled and prevent the draft saving operation from functioning. One of the known plugin is jira-connector (com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.jira.jira-connector)

Diagnosis

• Generating HAR files and analyzing web requests
• Try to check Firewall Rule that might be intercepting the background call
• You can run the following SQL query against Confluence database to check what is the plugin or plugin-module that is disabled:

select BANDANAVALUE from BANDANA where BANDANAKEY = 'plugin.manager.state.Map';

Resolution

1. Enable plugin jira-connector (com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.jira.jira-connector). You will need to expand the System Plugins to find it.
2. If that does not help, you will need to revert the entire plugin state back to the default
   1. Shut down Confluence

   2. Execute this command against the database (this will set all plugin modules back to their default enabled/disabled state, so be sure to check that all plugins are functioning as expected, especially the HTML Macros if you have them enabled):

      UPDATE BANDANA SET BANDANAVALUE = '<map/>' where BANDANAKEY = 'plugin.manager.state.Map';
      

   3. Restart Confluence
   4. Check your plugins are all functioning as expected. If there is any unexpected behaviour, ensure the plugin and the module is enabled, and try Clearing the Plugin Cache