The ability to view the list of watchers and add new watchers to a page has been added in Confluence 3.3. There is a menu option on the Tools menu called Manage Watchers, available only to space administrators.

This issue description also included the ability to assign page watches to groups. This is much more difficult to implement in Confluence and hasn't been done for 3.3. So I've created a separate issue to cover the ability to notify a group – CONF-20118. Please vote for that issue if you are interested in seeing that functionality implemented in addition to the new ability to manage individual watchers.

(Developer note: code committed and reviewed against CONF-5032.)

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.

Bubbles implementation restricts the watcher management to space admin or higher priv. The open source version (Watch list plugin) doesn't currently, however I'm sure that restriction would be easy to add.

Given the popularity of this feature and CONF-5032, 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

From David Matsumoto commenting on CONF-5032:
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.

I am interested to know if any customers have tried the Community Bubbles plugin mentioned by Matt Hodges above, and the feedback on it. We are reviewing the potential to support this feature natively in our product, but if the plugin works fine - we may just focus on other higher priority feature requests instead first.

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

The Community Bubbles plugin from Adaptavist provides this feature for Confluence.

You can try the plugin for free with a Confluence Developer or Evaluation license.

If you are an existing Confluence license holder, your technical contact for your license can generate a Developer license by following the instructions here.

I hope this helps.

Cheers

Matt

Atlassian Pre-Sales - Helping you get the most out of Confluence

sales@atlassian.com

Any news on this one?

We use it on our site and it works like a charm.

Thanks, Guy... The plugin page says that "This plugin allows administrators to specify that any user who comments on a page or a news item automatically starts watching it, so that they are automatically notified of further updates." Is the plugin's page outdated? I could find no reference to users CREATING pages being added to the watch list. I guess I will install and see.