This is another issue having its 'Sweet sixten' (as of 2020): https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-3406

I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but this is something that is standard for Confluence ('Watch Confluence space'): https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/watch-pages-spaces-and-blogs-139579.html

You can try out JIRA Workflow Essentials.

The use case and how to configure it is described here:https://codecentric.atlassian.net/wiki/display/WE/Post-functions#Post-functions-ManageWatchers

So configure a multi user picker custom field (for example:"Add new watcher"). If you want you can prefill the custom field with some common users with the "Default values for create screen" functionality (also included in that plugin).
Than you put the post function "Manage watcher" into your create transition where you select your "Add new watcher" custom field and you are done.

For those interested in solving this problem with a plugin, our Smartwatch for JIRA now includes support for project watch.

In your own profile you can define projects and issue types where you want watchers created. The watchers are not standard JIRA watchers, but smartwatch rules, so you can set them up to rigger on just some changes and avoid getting spammed. Or you can make smartwatch notify you when the issue is created and then take a look at it and decide what kind of watch you want for that issue.

Is this so hard to do? We would like it too.

That's a great idea! I wasn't able to get my RSS reader to authenticate into JIRA, though.

I recommend using the RSS feed from the project activity stream. Works pretty well

bulk watch is useless, because it doesn't apply to new issues
just add watch on project that's all
bug watcher? it this some kind of joke? i need to buy new tool just to receive an email??

We are anxiously waiting for this feature too!!

Bump... I'd like a solution for this one too!

I would pay for the plugin (although it should be part of the standard feature set IMHO) but as we use the cloud solution we can't.

#fail

As a new customer, it is really frustrating how some basic features that are missing from JIRA (e.g., watching projects, being able to see a hierarchy of linked issues) are only available as $200 third-party add-ons. After dropping $10,000 on a bunch of Atlassian tools, we hoped the response would at least be "we're working on it" instead of "pay somebody else some more money."

For those who are waiting for this feature request, there is a relief called Bug Watcher. It comes with project watch, filter watch, inapp notifications and a lot more useful features.

Coming up on the 10 year anniversary for this feature request... yay!

Created: 21/Oct/04

I too was surprised by this. I think it is an essential feature. Especially for people who use this as a ticketing system.

Please add this feature. The "watcher" feature on particular issues is incredibly useful, it's surprising it's not available on projects or components; having to ask an admin to set people up is a huge barrier to use.

This is also not quite minor for us. JIRA devs are very excited about their filter and subscriptions features, and they're great, but they don't suit all use cases.

Even in our own instance, not all Project Leads will want all the notifications others would, so changing the default notification scheme to email everything to the Project Lead isn't a good work-around either.

Hi Zeeshan, if you move the mouse over my name in this page, you'll get a popup with my email address.
Tibor

Hi Tibor,

I am not able to comment on this issue you created for me: https://metainf.atlassian.net/browse/BW-24. Can you please give me your email address?

Regards,
Zeeshan

Hi Zee,

I have created a support request for you at Bug Watcher issue tracker. Can we please collaborate through that issue instead of this one here?

Thank you,
Tibor

Hi Tibor,
I have installed the trial of "Bug Watcher" but when i go to a project > Watches and click on "Watch Project", nothing happens. Can you please help me testing this trial version?

Regards
Zee

We are preparing for OnDemand. So please keep watching the add-on.

Filter watching sounds like an incredibly useful feature.

Please add it to the OnDemand version of JIRA.

Thanks,
--Fred Stluka

What it provides is more generic: filter watching. You can save Filters (e.g. for one or more components of a project) and watch your filters.
Also, you can narrow the events you want to get notified on. Please see "Details" tab of the marketplace page or docs for more details.

what about component watch? does Bug Watcher also has this ability for users to only watch a specific component?

no, unfortunately, it is not available in OnDemand

It doesn't work for the OnDemand version though, does it?

A plugin that may help you is Bug Watcher that offers exactly this feature.
I'm not saying that it should not be a feature of JIRA, so you are basically right.

Hi, Atlassian Support,

Its very disappointing that you guys are not able to produce such a basic requirement yet after so many requests since 2004. Moreover you are not even telling those who are desperately waiting, that when this feature will be available ?

Very disappointed that this feature won't happen. It such a basic requirement that it should not be a paid plugin.

> What are the chances you will actually gonna go through and create this new feature?

The issue was opened in 2004. I think it is safe to say it will NOT happen.

What are the chances you will actually gonna go through and create this new feature?

@Andrzej (09/Jul/12): these are dead links in your comment

Hi, we have a new plugin as well

Watcher is a built over new remote app framework that can be used in both on-premises and OnDemand JIRA instances.
Watcher makes it possible for anyone to subscribe for email notifications for issues or projects - even anonymous users!

Check out the first release at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/remote-watcher

Hi, a new plugin has come to rescue those waiting for this issue. Checkout Bug Watcher at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.metainf.jira.plugin.bug-watcher. Project watch, bulk watch, personal notification scheme are all available. Filter watch is coming soon.

I switched to using RSS instead.

– Gabriel

Don't hold your breath, guys. There was a time, long ago, when Atlassian was very responsive to customer requests. That time is long gone and they don't seem to be improving this product any more. This simple request has been open for 7 years. If it hasn't happened by now, it isn't going to.

And that is fine, but the problem is the administrator overhead is completely prohibitive on any JIRA instance where there are many users and/or projects.

Meanwhile we use a workaround: I introduced a role "Project Watcher" and modified the Notification Scheme in that way that all "Project Watchers" get emails once an issue is created. Not more not to spam them. If someone wants to watch new issues he can then decide to watch the issue explicitly.

Having the role now a project administrator is able to add and remove watchers. Not the best solution but it works.

... Having said this I just recognize that this solution already got suggested. But perhaps it's worth repeating the workaround.

Please add this, sort of shocked its not available. The workarounds do not address the situation where a watcher wants to receive emails containing comments and other status changes made to issues.

We've been using Jira for years now and we would love to get away from having to maintain one email list per project just to deal with user-managed project notifications.

This is an interesting feature, I've voted for it
The WA described above is either a possible solution, but it requires that I havbe Admin rights on projects, but here the initial request was about letting people watch projects that they are interested in.

I've implemented Anton's suggestion, and it works well and is relatively easy to set up.

"1. Since JIRA 3.7 we have added Project Roles which have membership per project:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/project_role_management.html
Project Roles can be added to Notification Schemes. Therefore, there is no need to create a new group for each project. Users cannot add or remove themselves from a Role though, a Project Admin (in Enterprise Edition) or Global Admin will have to."

Again the only downside is that an administrator has to add someone to the project role.

This is still a feature that I think should exist. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to implement, and it's a feature that gets requested often enough that it would be useful.

The case I commonly see is when two or more project managers or other senior people want notification on all updates, but they should still be able to opt in or out of the notification at will.

this plugin comes close for those people without this, still this a such a gaping hole

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JIRA+Component+Watcher+Plugin

For those that want to watch a whole project - what I find that works real well for me is the Activity Streams plugin.

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/Atlassian+Activity+Stream+Plugin

I set this up to watch a particular project then subscribe to the RSS feed from the portlet.

The Activity streams plugin is currently "unsupported" but we are planning some improvements to the plugin and hope to have its status changed to supported in a future release of the plugin. It is our plans to have an updated streams plugin that will also ship with 4.0.

Regards,

Brian

This would be a useful feature as we have many projects in our JIRA instance.
Would be nice to allow the user to pick one or more projects, one or more components and/or fix versions too.
This allows someone to subscribe to very specific sets of tickets. A previous tracking system I used had this feature and it was very useful.

We get lots of requests from people who want to get notifications about all issues in their project. This means branching the notification scheme, and naming them individually. Then we end up with many notif schemes, so have a multiple maintenance problem when we want to change them all.

The workarounds I'm afraid are not effective, eg the jira_watcher above. You'd need one dummy user and one email alias per project, we have well over a hundred. We wouldn't to have to go to another team to get this changed each time.

I would like to see a Watch Project feature, in fact, go the whole hog and also allow watching of components and versions. When watching a project/component/versions you could subscribe to the same event as shown in the notifcations of each scheme. These would be in addition to the notifis prescribed by the scheme in use, although obviously you would not get two mails from the same event.

cheers, jamie

Hey - here's an idea ...

Create a dummy user called jra_watcher (e.g. for the JRA project), and add that user to the events you want (or all events) the notification scheme for the project. Set the email address of that user to something like JRA_Watchers, and then have the I.T. department set up that dummy email address as a distribution list.

Then anyone who wants to 'watch a project' only has to have their email address added to the distribution list. Granted, it's not maintainable within JIRA but it could be a workaround.

Mark, Daniel,

Thanks for your feedback.

I appreciate where you are coming from. We have a lot of feature requests (thousands), and while we are extremely committed to improving JIRA as quickly as we can, we cannot get to all the requests. For more information on the way features and improvements are scheduled please see:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+and+Improvements

I guess I do not have a perfect solution for this, but there might be 2 things that could help:

1. Since JIRA 3.7 we have added Project Roles which have membership per project:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/project_role_management.html
Project Roles can be added to Notification Schemes. Therefore, there is no need to create a new group for each project. Users cannot add or remove themselves from a Role though, a Project Admin (in Enterprise Edition) or Global Admin will have to.

2. In Enterprise edition it is possible to add a Column Layout:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v3.11/issue_filters.html#filter_navigator_columns
to a filter and save it. The columns can have the Description field added to them. Subscriptions in HTML format will display the columns configured for the filter.

Cheers,
Anton

Hey Anton,
I just want to second everything Mark has mentioned regarding the advantages/disadvantages of the workarounds

a subscribe to project would just be infinitely better than the workarounds we are using.

cheers

Hello Anton,

we tried two workarounds and we don't feel happy with both of them

• First we tried the solution provided by Nick as you suggested.
  • Advantages:
    • Listeners get informed on new issues.
    • Listeners can control if they want to be informed or not.
    • Not so many mails from JIRA.
  • Disadvantage:
    • The overview only reports some contents and e. g. not the description.
      To get the description you have to follow the link in side the mail. This is already too much overhead and I watch myself just being to lazy to click on the link. It costs too much time.
    • Huge delay between issue creation and report.
• Then we tried to set something like a broadcast-mail address as notification recipient in the notification scheme.
  • Advantages:
    • Immediate updates.
      As soon as an issue is created you get informed. This allows immediate responses e. g. if I see an issue I know a workaround for I can immediately update the issue.
    • All required contents available inside the mail-reader.
      In contrast to the filter subscription you can see the description and such. Ok, you might set the description as a column for the filter but this really doesn't look good.
  • Disadvantages:
    • Users cannot control if they want to subscribe or not.
      We already got complaints that some users don't like this features (others do!). Current workaround for them is to set a filter in their mail client. But it would be better to have some subscription capabilities inside JIRA.
    • See above: Perhaps too much "spamming".

All in all: To satisfy all needs we really need this subscribe to project feature. Especially as from the idea it matches very well with JIRA. Of course I cannot estimate how well this feature integrates with the JIRA sources.

Hi,

This feature does not exist in the Enterprise edition. However, I am hoping that the solution provided by Nick in the comment above:
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5006?focusedCommentId=92527#action_92527
would work well. If the solution does not suit your needs, would you be able to tell us why?

Cheers,
Anton

We have the professional edition and would be very interested by this feature. Does it exist in the Enterprise edition of Jira? Thanks

This feature would be a great addition. I work for an IT/Fulfillment/Call Center outsourcing company and we have many clients. We want to be able to use 1 notification scheme rather than create a new one for each client because we don't want client A to receive notifications about issues created for Client B. The easiest way to achieve that is by allowing someone to watch a project rather than an individual issue. I haven't explored the filter solution, but I just wanted to put in my 2 cents.