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This issue is mentioned in commits included in the Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.52.1-0001 release being approved for production: CPU-171

I know this is just getting ready to merge in, but does this also allow for adding / removing "Watch all new blog posts in a Space" on behalf of another user?

Glad you guys are working on this!

Drew, you are a star! Looking into it, thanks

Jonas,

It's going to be under the NOTIFICATIONS table. You'll need to get their NOTIFICATIONSID to remove.

I ran into this issue with disabled users still as watchers. This is the query I used to find disabled users who were still space watchers:

mysql> use confluence;
mysql> select c.spacename, b.display_name, a.*  from NOTIFICATIONS a inner join cwd_user b on a.username = b.user_name and b.active = 'F' inner join SPACES c on a.spaceid = c.spaceid  where a.pageid is null and a.spaceid is not null;

Once I got their ID, I then ran:

mysql> delete from NOTIFICATIONS where NOTIFICATIONID = 7667798;

At least that is what I found in my history. With a little query changes, you should be able to query the spacename you want and then get the userid's in it you want to remove.

I suggest making a mock database and site first to test any manual deletions.

Cheers,

-Drew

Does anyone know what mysql table space watchers are added in so i can hack a few users away that left the company and now are stuck in limbo?

I disabled the Team Space blueprint for our site because of this issue.

I agree with Anthony Pelosi. A very similar thing happened to us.

It is odd that you can create a team space and automatically add watchers (as a side effect of naming that person a team member) but then you cannot remove those very same watchers once you've added them.

Please implement this feature. Spamming 25 members incessantly we just added to a Space and then asking them to go in and select "Stop Watching This Space" (because we can't do it for them) started off this initiative on a sour note and has caused the project members to revolt against using Confluence.

An inactive user who is watching a space should not be.
We should be able to clean this up.

Ended up exporting a space as XML, editing entities.xml and removing Notification objects, deleting the space in Confluence and then Restoring the updated XML export. Not so bad with a new space, but a major pain if it's a big space.
it shouldn't have to be this way though.

Not very agile, are we @atlassian?
This is really a very annoying "feature" of Confluence.
I guess we should all spam our directors so we can dump Confluence.

There are 28 Confluence open issues that have more votes than this issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20CONF%20AND%20status%20in%20%28Open%2C%20%22In%20Progress%22%29%20ORDER%20BY%20votes%20DESC

Coarse visual inspection suggests that about half those issues precede 2011.

The highest voted issue has over 700 votes and was created in 2005.

I think by these metrics it is safe to conclude that this issue is not likely to be resolved soon; it would have to be voted much higher, or if the backlog is working on issues in vote priority order then it will be a while before it percolates to the top.

@Brock Just for you I'll make my original comment only 10% serious.

This is insane come on @atlassian

At least tell us something.

there have been 178 votes. I don't know what it takes to bump the stack rank of this. It's been around since, what 2011?

Is @atlassian still not planning to update this (mainly removing space watch as admin)? After all votes and comments I'd think it is time for Atlassian to comment on this. Thanks.

in defense of @Russell, he did say "half seriously" and bringing out that alternative was simply a work around which helps to highlight the overall problem. Thanks to both of you.

@Scott i couldn't agree more. Confluence introduced this problem and we shouldn't have to go outside to another program or app to put a band-aid over it.

@Russell you are not smart. dumb comment.

Well filters don't address the issue, and yes my Director clearly knows how to use filters; but that underscores my point: The tool (confluence) shouldn't introduce new problems that have to be managed in other tools (mail clients).

I don't disagree with the need to have this admin capability in the product, but a half serious suggestion; how about teaching the Director to use filters in Outlook to automatically file said emails in a subfolder for later review when she has time

I'm new to this site. I need the ability to remove watchers from a space as an admin. Will this feature ever be added? Why?

Senior Director wants to see your space. You add the the Director and they get blitzed with email. They don't have the time to turn if off and you need to turn it off for them. Not being able to turn this off leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the Director – a bad taste about Confluence!

How many votes needed to make it so? Voted

For those of you who have reported the issue with Team Spaces not removing watchers when the person is removed from the team, we have raised a bug report here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-36503. Please watch that bug report for progress on that particular issue.

I'm also disappointed to see that this has been open for almost 4 years. For a smaller company, I can understand that this isn't a big deal, but some of our teams are over 50 people, and there's been some turnaround recently, so having to depend on end users to follow certain steps, especially if they're new to the company, isn't a solid practice.

We could probably work around the absence of just this feature, but combined with a few other ones and it's lead to a lot of time spent just reading through names, then contacting individuals outside of Confluence and asking them to take some action, and usually then having to followup with them again later. Add to it, that we're currently working with the Cloud version of Confluence, we don't have the option of updating the database directly, or installing some of the custom add ons that might help with this issue.

For one specific case with our company, we have a team of almost 50 people in one space. Some rotate in and out of the team, as they work on multiple projects, so it's difficult to keep track of who's receiving updates in Confluence. Since groups can't be added as watchers, the watcher list isn't sortable (nor in alphabetical order), and DELETED users still appear as watchers, we have to search through the watcher list to determine who is receiving notifications. If we find someone who isn't watching the space, we need to contact them and ask them to watch. Usually this involved some followup and possibly walking them through the steps. Anytime someone is added or rotates off the team, we run through the same or similar process. Does this resolve the issue? Sure, but I don't consider it an acceptable workaround for a program that's supposed to help us be more efficient. Please consider the time spent working around minor bugs and features like this.

Cannot add groups as space watchers.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-20118

When an account is deleted, their account is still shown as a space watcher "unknown User (username)".
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-34473

Hi,

It is important for my team to be able to remove space watchers when they're no longer with the team, or when they prefer not to be spammed by the notifications.
I don't understand at all why this feature is missing.

Cheers,
Allister

Agree with what everyone that this should be given a high priority. It simply makes no sense for someone to remain on the spacer's watcher list if he/she no longer has permission to access the space.

Stephen Deutsch's user macro is a good interim workaround, but I'm wondering if it's possible to do this from the database directly (e.g. if needing to remove a bunch of users), or to get the list of all watchers for all spaces?

Confluence version: 5.3.4
Database: MS SQL Server

Different organisations are having different understandings of transparency, hierarchy and liberty.
It should be possible to have a configurable option that allows Confluence and space Administrators to set up a managing-watchers-capability for users, groups and spaces.

When we create a confluence team space, removing a person from the team does NOT remove them from the watch list. And we have no way to remove them forcefully from the watchers list either. This behavior needs to classified as a high priority bug since this is a serious security issue. Spaces/Pages we thought were private are sending out notifications to people who are no longer on that particular team and we have no way to remove them. I'm unable to do this as a confluence System Administrator.

Confluence Version: 5.5.2
Build: 5510

This needs to be implemented - it is basic Admin functionality to have the ability to administer user functions related to these types of notifications. We are using 5.6.3 and assumed this would be base functionality in this latest version.

For those running the standalone version of Confluence (Confluence Server), I wrote a user macro that allows you to add/remove space watches (and remove multiple page watches as well). You can find it here: https://bitbucket.org/stephendeutsch/confluence-user-macros/src/ under "bulk remove watchers" and "remove watches for user.vm".

Simply give it a name in the user macro browser (you probably want to select the option "Visible only to system administrators in the Macro Browser"), embed it in a page (you should probably also restrict the page to confluence-administrators), and you are all set to go!

Note that you must have "Remote API" (under General Configuration) enabled in order to remove page watches.
This macro should be compatible back to Confluence 4.0, although I haven't been able to test it exhaustively.

If you have any questions, you can e-mail me at stephen.deutsch@zanox.com, but I can't offer full support, so please use it at your own risk.
It would be nice if Atlassian supported it out of the box, but at least hopefully this will work for some people as a temporary workaround.

affects version 4.3.7 and 5.4.4

I totally agree. This is a major vulnerability issue and to my surprise, this issue is now 3 years old. What is happening Atlassian. Where is the agility that once was here?

Voted. Table stakes for us from a compliance / spam perspective.

Voted.

Admins should be able to admin Confluence.

Like others stated, it doesn't make sense and is necessary functionality for reasons stated above.

Voted. It doesn't make sense that a space admin can't select people to watch a space.

voted. I can manage to have people watch a page already. Why shouldn't I have people watch spaces either?

Voted. Can't understand why this feature isn't there already.

We're evaluating Confluence and as part of the evaluation I created a Team Space with a few team members. The wizard automatically added these team members as watchers of that space. Now I have no way to remove them as watchers even though I'm the one who added them in the first place.

Teams change over time. As the admin for a team space I should be able to adjust the team membership over time - including both permissions and watches.

This is definitely still needed.

Please implement ASAP!

brett.ryan, a plugin called community bubble used to has this feature but removed it later on. I guess tim.hughes mixed the vendor of that plugin with Atlassian.

Hi tim.hughes unfortunately this was never actually a feature of Confluence. We need to manually remove the entries from the DB.

It is a nuisance though and I would love to see this feature implemented.

I'm sick of seeing argument after argument about why we need this feature...surely enough has been said....and quite justifiably. More importantly it pisses me off that this was once a feature that we, or at least I, relied upon and then Atlassian decided to go ahead and just remove it without (from what I could see) customer consultation!
Come on guys (Atlassian)...just pull your fingers out and bring this feature back. It's a must and this has been dragging on for far too long.
thanks
Tim

We need this feature not only for compliance reasons (separation of concerns), but also to cleanup: There's quite some people in the space watchers that no longer work here...

We are looking for an alternative to Confluence because this is causing a lot of spam for people no longer on a project. It also requires my time to walk them through the steps to unwatch the entire space.

this would be very helpful

I need this for maintenace issues since people move around an forget to remove their space watch, they get overwhelmed with notifications they no longer need and start treating them as spam this defeating the purpose of watches.

vosipov, yes those users still receive notifications from that space even though they don't have access to that space already. I agree with Drew, this is a bug that needs to be fixed soon.

dbentley, in your case, do disabled users watching a space still receive notifications from that space?