Looking forward to seeing this, hoping quite strongly that it'll be exposed in the API too. We integrate Confluence quite heavily here with our portal.

I'm not sure how this isn't a duplicate of CONF-3703, but I've added a "relates to" link in case I'm missing something.

Adaptavist have just announced that the Community Bubbles plugin, which allows you to review and manage a list of watchers, is now free. More details to come soon.

Uhm, you know there is an open source plugin already available to do this:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Watch+List+Plugin

And another plugin allows automatically adding watchers to child pages:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Descendent+Notification+Plugin

And for customers requiring a supported implementation of watcher/favourite management there is Bubbles:

https://www.adaptavist.com/display/Bubbles/User+Interest (provides control at page/news, space and site level)

Now, what would be useful is if you could allow user groups to be added as watchers via the API, that way you'd get an ecosystem of plugins allowing more group-level functionality.

Given the popularity of this feature and CONF-3703, we would like to support this functionality natively. We will consider this for a near future release, we estimate the work to be about 2-3 weeks - but need to schedule it with other high priority feature requests.

If you're interested to know how we decide on which features to implement, please read this:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+and+Improvements

CONF-3703 is highly related to this issue, allows assignment of page watches to individuals or groups.

You could try the relatively new Watch List Plugin, though it currently has the drawback of allowing anyone to edit the watches.

Another option is the Confluence Contributors Plugin and in particular the Contributors Summary Macro. We selectively place it on a critical pages to be monitored and it can display the number of watches for each person. For general monitoring, we made a new page that has the macro setup to monitor a complete hierarchy of pages and display the number of watches and what pages are being watched. The formatting isn't ideal particularly because you can't immediately get the report of who is watching a specific page, but it does give you a general idea.

Any news on this one. Our users keep badgering us about it.

I'm pretty disappointed that there isn't any administrative command to remove watches when the user who requested them has been removed; it should either be a part of the removal process or count as contributed content that makes a user non-removable. In either case, there needs to be an administrative procedure available that will remove watches from arbitrary users, and not one implemented only in a for-pay plugin whose purchase is not among an organization's options.

Guy - does Adaptavist have an estimate of when the Bubbles plugin will be officially out? I see a long list of macros (add-favourite-user macro, portal macro, etc) under the Bubbles Macros on the Adapvist website. Can we use them individually?

I am looking at this page and was tempted to write an unsolicited advice (if I may please): https://www.adaptavist.com/display/Bubbles/portal+macro

This page is too busy and appears confusing. There are links all over the place, which I believe account to the added slowness of the website. I honestly am not sure if the intention is to demonstrate as many features as you can in a page, but it won't help me appreciate them any better if I am confused by their presence all at once.

What can help Adaptavist is a graphics/web designer whose main expertise is in interface object taxonomy. In our organization, we value simplicity, and a golden rule is that our website users should be able to easily find what they are looking for - fast. As much as I really admire your products (we are a subscriber of your Theme Builder Plugin and continue to build Confluence with it), I am not happy having my browser intermittently freeze on your website even with a T1 connection.

I hope you won't take this in a negative way; believe me, with English as not my mother tongue I have tried to make this comment as polite as I could.

More power to Adaptavist and I hope to hear about Bubbles officially released soon.