-
Suggestion
-
Resolution: Unresolved
-
2
-
4
-
NOTE: This suggestion is for Confluence Cloud. Using Confluence Server? See the corresponding suggestion.
Status Update: 11 March 2022
Hi folks, my name is Daniel Ayele and I'm a Product Manager on the Confluence team where I manage our collaboration feature family. Thank you for your feedback and suggestion to improve our notifications for page and content updates. I'm excited to announce that we have plans on our roadmap to make a number of improvements to the notifications experience in Confluence to help customers stay informed and manage their notifications experience. Most relevant, in the next few months we'll be releasing a new Confluence Daily Digest option which will allow customers to receive all page update notifications across all of the spaces and pages they watch in one daily email. We also have a number of additional improvements to the notifications experience planned for the next 12-18 months. Stay tuned to our community and other product update channels to learn more when we bring this functionality to market.
From Tom Wolff's post on the Confluence forum:
One of the most powerful aspects of Confluence is its email notification of new and changed content. I'm sure this matter has been discussed previously, but I didn't find readily a forum posting that summarizes the issues as my wiki users and I see them.
The problem is that users receive too many email notifications that most people consider unhelpful at best and very annoying at worst. The control mechanisms currently available in Confluence 2.10 are inadequate to control sending email notifications, and "watch" options available to users can not make up for this deficiency.
I think we can divide actions and content into new, edited and removed pages, comments, news, and attachments as summarized below:
Content Type New Edited Removed
Page - X -
Comment - - -
News - - -
Attachment - - -The X shows the only option, as far as I can tell, for preventing sending email notifications.
Per this chart, email notifications are automatically sent out for all combinations EXCEPT for edited pages based on whether users check the "Minor Change?" option box. (Searching the Confluence forum for "minor change" provides several conversations on this matter back at least to 2006.)
We find particularly annoying email notifications resulting from removing content. As administrator, I have removed pages, comments, and attachments as inappropriate or obsolete and have almost certainly not wanted to bring attention to that removed content.
We also believe email notifications about attachments (added, moved, or removed) to be of very low value. Attachments are almost always supporting or described by the page content itself which will be the subject of its own email notification.
My users and I believe it is past time for Atlassian to provide users and administrators better control in Confluence over sending these email notifications. This includes, but is not limited to, improving the "Minor Change?" option with clear option buttons or similar mechanisms as discussed in other forum entries.
I look forward to elaboration of this issue by other users and action by Atlassian on this matter.
- is duplicated by
-
- Closed
-
- Closed
- is related to
-
- Gathering Interest
-
- Gathering Interest
[CONFCLOUD-14888] Better control of email notifications for new, changed, and removed content
The custom notification feature in the Better Content Archiving app gives you much more control over notifications in the following way.
You can define a so-called notification scheme that can contain one or more notifications and can be applied to any space. A notification is defined by:
- a schedule (CRON expression)
- a CQL query that collects the pages/blogposts to include in the notification
- an email template (custom subject and body)
- recipients (any combination of last modifier, author, owners, space admins, specific users and specific groups)
Because all these are fully customizable, it solves many of use cases mentioned in previous comments.
When a user edits a page, Confluence should not by default add that user as a watcher. That just makes this notification problem work. Maybe they want that, but often they don't. And there's no checkbox to opt-out at page-save time.
(This is how Data Center works anyway; I know this suggestion is for Cloud, but I don't have such an instance to test this on).
This is a daily problem for me and the team I work in.
Our test case pages are very very long. Each row in the table is a test case.
Any change to the page issues an email that is over 2MB is size, irrespective of the number of changes. The email takes ages to fully load, and then begins the hunt to find the green-shaded content that has changed. During page load in the email, Outlook hangs.
Addressing this will help:
- Improve application of time and focus/attention - only see rows where content has changed. (If I want to see the whole page, I'll go to Confluence)
- Reduce impact on Outlook and its usability
- Support adoption of Confluence by removing obstacles
Notifications spamming their mailbox will probably make Confluence adoption extremely difficult with my users and clients.
Just to add another voice on this, I'm in the middle of trying to drive departmental adoption of Confluence, and the #1 point of feedback I've heard from users is that notifications are blowing up their inbox. I can help them on a 1:1 basis and provide articles on how to self-resolve the issue (either by changing Confluence settings or setting Outlook rules), but I can't guarantee that everyone who has the problem is going to raise the topic or search for it, and those silent users are going to become resentful.
As an admin, I would expect to be able to set the defaults for communication levels, and then allow users to opt themselves in further, not to have to claw their way out from under a ton of unwanted messages.
Alice
added a comment - David not sure how sustainable of a solution it is for you - but the way I've worked around it (as you can see I'm a lonely voice in this request) is to set page restrictions so only you can view/edit the page before deleting the comment. Even though it's a completely inefficient process - it will at least keep the notifications from going out.
Alice
added a comment - David not sure how sustainable of a solution it is for you - but the way I've worked around it (as you can see I'm a lonely voice in this request) is to set page restrictions so only you can view/edit the page before deleting the comment. Even though it's a completely inefficient process - it will at least keep the notifications from going out. We have interest in this from a perspective of deleting inappropriate comments. It would be sufficient for our use case if we could turn off notiication's when deleting comments. I haven't any good Marketplace options for this either.
Alice
added a comment - This continues to be problematic for me/my users. Confluence is known as "spammy" around the office, even with all e-mail settings changed and individuals unchecking the 'notify watchers box'.
I reiterate my previous comment - if the vision of Confluence is to help reduce inbox traffic, the inability to control notifications for more than just page edits needs to be addressed...Please!!
Alice
added a comment - This continues to be problematic for me/my users. Confluence is known as "spammy" around the office, even with all e-mail settings changed and individuals unchecking the 'notify watchers box'.
I reiterate my previous comment - if the vision of Confluence is to help reduce inbox traffic, the inability to control notifications for more than just page edits needs to be addressed...Please!!
This was first raised in 2009. 14yrs on, you are still gathering information. Haven't we moved on to an Agile world of continuous improvements and delivery of working software over gathering of information (when 14yrs still isn't enough)? We need to raise this as higher priority to others and get some updates how many more years is this going to take?