It looks like this request was reopened in March of 2024, which is encouraging. Given that notifications happen when adding a customer as a request participant, it would be great if the Cloud version of JSM could act similarly, but for agents. It's strange that the workflow is:

1. Find the issue to add another agent as a Watcher.
2. Add an agent as a Watcher.
3. Specifically mention them and/or make change to the issue to let them know they've been added.

We'd love to see this happen automatically to raise someone's awareness rather than needing a separate step.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for voting and commenting on this issue. Your feedback is key to helping us understand how you use JIRA so we can continue improving your experience. We have reviewed this issue over the last few days.

We've made the decision to close this request, as we do not reasonably expect to implement it in any future iteration of JIRA. Adding another event that triggers an email notification adds more complexity to JIRA's notification system. The existing options for notifying a user (using the Share button or @mentioning them in a comment) are sufficient in most cases and leverage existing patterns.

I understand that our decision may be disappointing. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Dave Meyer
dmeyer@atlassian.com
Product Manager, JIRA Platform

Hi, I know that watchers and voters here would prefer to have this as a core feature but Atlassian does not seem to implement it any time soon.

Our tiny though award-winning add-on Bug Watcher Notifications provides this (and a lot more) as a special feature of its Issue Watchers custom field type. This is how it works.

Sorry for the confusion. I don't work for Atlassian, I was speaking from the point of view of another deployed instance of JIRA.

And I meant that my organization has considered removing the ability for any user to "manage watchers" in order to add other people to the watch list for an issue. The @mention and auto-watch features have reduced (but not eliminated) the need for us to manually add a list of people to a watch list.

I would echo what Ryan just said. Please do not remove the ability to add other watchers.

Alex, if you are saying you would remove the ability to add watchers from Jira (and not just change the Manage Watchers permission for your organization), I would strongly recommend against that. We have lab personnel and also sales people that interact more via email than logging in. They may not respond to a ticket but want to see when others do. They appreciate when our customer service, marketing, etc. add them as watchers.

Between @mentions and auto-watch, both which were recently introduced we've considered removing the ability for users to add others to the watch list.

If a user need to notify someone a one-time @mention notification is ideal, and then that person can decide if they want to be on the watch list, or if they interact with the issue then auto-watch will add them.

Finally, to be pedantic, this isn't a bug. It's a feature, and one that doesn't really make sense anymore, in my opinion.

As I'm unsure of any other mechanism to contact you (Dave), I'll add a further comment here in the knowledge that the other 133 watchers may want to add something (or perhaps to shout me down)?

My user base has made much noise about this irksome bug.

With 228 votes on what appears from the outside to be a trivial item to fix in a patch, I'd ask that you consider being more responsive to your customer base and fix this.

I fail to understand how this could lie on the back burner for over 10 years!?

John

I need to add my voice to those requesting this 'feature'.

This appears to be a simple change in Jira using pre-existing features.

My organization is reluctant to add spend on Add-ons supplied by third parties, especially for something as simple as this.

We feel that it is a fair assumption to expect this form of fix/enhancement to be delivered under out support agreement in timely fashion.

This was opened in 2004!?

Hi Jonas. I completely understand. There are quite a few JIRAs that fall into the same category.
Thanks
Paul