Hi Everyone,
After much discussion we've concluded we won't be implementing this global setting.

Why are we not doing this?

• We believe the majority of users want to know if others comment or update on their content
  After speaking to a lot of customers about how they interact with the system, a constant problem we hear is that users create content and have no idea that other people updated or commented content they contributed to. Secondly, we think it is counter intuitive to ask everyone that creates or edits a page to then secondly add themselves as watcher to the page. Manually adding yourself as a watcher is more suited for those that discover content they want to stay notified of any updates of (and haven't necessary contributed to it)
• A majority of users use email as their primary notification, not RSS.

What about those users who only use RSS or who do not want to know of any updates to content they've contributed to?
Whilst this is a valid use case, we believe this is the minority of users and because of this we have created a user-specific setting for those users. If you believe the majority of your users will enable this setting, then we have the global workaround available which is documented below.

Workaround

The config lives in an XML file: <confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/confluence-x.x.x.jar/preferences-default.xml.

You need to change the boolean value to false, thus:

   <preference type="Boolean">
       <name>confluence.prefs.watch.my.own.content</name>
       <value>false</value>
   </preference>

Then place it as <confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/preferences-default.xml and restart Confluence.

For more details on modifying jarred config files, please refer to this doc: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Editing+Files+within+JAR+Archives

So if we are not doing this, what are we going to do instead?
It sounds like a lot of administrators here are concerned about other related problems to notifications. In the long term we will be looking at improving the way Confluence sends you notifications. Here are some related issues we are thinking about for the long-term roadmap which will help solve some of the problems you have described on this issue:

• Making watching more versatile
• Providing more powerful ways of managing your watches (CONF-12314, CONF-8458)
• Looking at digest notifications (CONF-14485, CONF-7612)
• Looking at adapting the "minor change" setting to not add you as a watcher if checked.

Sherif Mansour
Confluence Product Manager
smansour at atlassian dot com