Similar ticket is CONFCLOUD-41550 and that one is still open.

This really needs to be addressed for organizations moving to cloud and who don't require an onboarding experience.  

Pathetic.

Is there any justification given for "Won't Do"? This is a big problem, and like many others we are about to dump a bunch of new users into the system. In our case, it not just asks to watch spaces, but to create a new space too. I'm telling my new users to create a dummy space to throw away later, but that's a huge waste of time and electrons. Please re-open this ticket and have a dialog with the users (us admins) about this problem.

I agree with Thomas.

We really need a way to turn off the whole "onboarding" sequence for all new users. Tthis onboarding nonsense will cause a lot of confusion.

We really need a way to turn off the whole "onboarding" sequence for all new users. We will introduce Confluence to hundreds of users going forward, and this onboarding nonsense will cause a lot of confusion.

That's unfortunate.  Can you point us to where we can see some of those smarter notification ideas?

We're forced to go to great lengths to reduce this problem for our users - intercepting and altering emails based on character-strings in the body to prefix the subject with watch, task, mention, like, or comment so that users can dump the unwanted emails via email-filter. 

Still, we'd rather our users aren't forced to watch a space in the first place.

Thank you.

Thank you for raising this suggestion. I regret to inform you that we have no plans at present to support this functionality. In order to set expectations, we're closing this request now.

We will instead be exploring how to deliver smarter notifications (relevant and selective), which we feel is a better solution to the problem highlighted of "too many emails." 

This is a big one for our company. Here's the scenario with a bit of commentary:

1. I'm a new user on my first day and I go to the system where I'm being told that "everything happens": confluence.
2. Confluence asks me to choose a space I'm interested in. No 'skip'? Wow, this must be important. Okay, being an new employee hungry to do a good job, I select multiple spaces.
3. Then, I get tons of email.
4. Then, I miss important messages about 'mentions' or 'assigned tasks'.
5. Now, I find Confluence annoying and start finding other solutions.

Many people in our company are underwater with Confluence notifications. They can't separate the good from the bad. Forcing them to watch spaces makes a product weakness into a bigger problem.

Please provide a way to let users start using the tool without becoming a Space watcher.

I agree, and Stephen makes a good point. If new users are forced to watch a space, they're likely to see notifications as an annoyance and either ignore them or unsubscribe right away.  I worry they'll be unlikely to start watching pages they do care about.  Letting this skip this choice would be a much better approach. 

I don't want to disable the onboarding process completely in my instance (as suggested here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-skip-the-welcome-action-for-new-users-in-confluence-777016501.html), but forcing new users to watch a space before they can use the product is just setting them up to simply ignore every single email from Confluence.  I would much rather users get email notifications for items they care about, not items they were unwittingly forced into getting notifications for.

Is there any way to disable just this page of the onboarding process?