Great to see a checkbox today for "Notify watchers by email" (that I can un-check for my spelling/grammar/formatting nitpicks)  

That's my request done. 

Hi All! Thank you for all of your feedback here. We've heard loud and clear that the need to update/ publish a document with version comments and without notify watchers is an important part of your workflow. 

Therefore, we have added the "notify watchers" check box into the "Update Dialog" for consecutive updates to your published pages. You will now be able to click the 'carrot' dropdown next to the "update" button to update your pages with version comments, and without notify watchers. 

This improvement should land in your instances in the next couple of days! No action is needed on your end. 

We will continue to discuss the notify watchers functionality for the initial publish dialog. 

Thanks again! 

Sam 

I would also like to be able to publish a new version of a page with: 

• changes so small I don't want a notification sent 
• BUT a version comment to record what those changes are (and therefore why there was no notification needed). 

Coming from a coding background, adding a "commit message" to log what changes I made for future reference is a habit I'd like to maintain. 

Please let us use a functionality that we have already grown accustomed to and make use of on a daily basis: adding version comments without notifying watchers.

I am concerned that one of two things will happen:

1. Our users will update pages with a version comment every time and notify all watchers. This is great for versioning and creating a changelog for the page - but will inundate our users with email notifications! This will reduce the impact of email notifications and lead to more users to either: a) stop watching a space, or b) ignore their email notifications from Confluence. We do not want either of these outcomes to occur.
2. Our users will use "publish without notifying watchers" more often, and not add any version comments. This maintains the integrity of the email notification as a signifier that "hey, an important update has happened", but it means our version history will cease to function as a usable changelog, and users will have to painstakingly crawl through dozens of versions to identify when a specific minor update was made.

Please bring back this functionality!

I too am very concerned about the removal of the option to notify others. Our employees are trained i) to only notify others if the change is consequential, to avoid spamming watchers with changes to pages and ii) to save with version comments. We can no longer do this and it is a significant degradation to usability.

For initial publication, I want to publish without notifying others because you need to publish a page in order to do things like:

• make a child page under it
• make a link to the page from another page

As I am using Confluence to create a user guide for one of our products, I set up my outline (page structure) first with draft pages that just contain the page title and the boilerplate text of my template. Whenever I need to link to one of those pages as I write up another page, I have to publish the page. It is not in a state that anyone else needs to know about at that point.

After that initial publication, I might need to edit a page just to add an anchor to link to. No one needs to be notified of this change to the page.

Hi Sam,

Thanks for creating this feature.

I will divide my comments into sections:

1. Initial publication - the page creator should be given the option to choose to publish without notification, so it should be added to the new publication detail box as was in the initial design
2. Flexible default - From reading the comments on the feature and the comment above, some users wish to notify the users as the default, and some wish to have don't notify as the default. This reflects different governance and organizational cultural differences essential to the organizations. For instance, I will still prepare the default to notify others, whereas Julia wants the default to be don't notify.
   This means that the default should be flexible at space and site levels. So, an org can decide for the entire org that the default does not notify, and for certain spaces, the default will be to notify about publications. 
3. Receiving notifications -  The decision on notifications depends on how the users receive the notifications. We also need flexibility for a site admin to distinguish specific space notifications from the daily digest. 
   I would recommend having a collaborative session with your 5-6 main users (all together) and brainstorming with them before designing the solutions. 

The new publishing experience is pretty cool and adds a lot of value. But unfortunately one function gone missing on the way (version comment without notifying watchers) - I think it should be clear to bring this already used functionality back. I, as a Jira and Confluence Admin, use this functionality a lot. I maintain a lot of technical documentation where I need the version comments when major changes happened, but I don't want to notify watchers, because I do this separately via blog (to explain the change).

Also I would highly recommend to add the "notify others" checkbox in the Publish Dialog, like said in the announcement. We also trained our colleagues to publish pages with notifying watchers only if it is necessary (to control the notifications coming from Confluence). Most colleagues are doing it, but are annoyed because the button is hidden in another menu and therefore often click the "Publish" Button instead (by mistake). In my opinion, is notifying watchers or not a publishing option the user should be able to select and therefore it should be part of the Publish Dialog.

And if you add the "notify others" checkbox into the Publish Dialog, you automatically added the version comment back as well - two birds with one stone