20 years later and still looking for this functionality. Oh well, maybe in another 10 years it will be reconsidered  

Here we are in 2024 and we are still wishing that we had this option.

What I find a bit mad with this is that because the feature doesn't exist admins have to create automations to do it so ultimately Jira get more money as it's bumps up the amount of automations we use i.e. higher bracket licence = more automations you can run each month. 

Seems a little unfair.

Whoa whoa whoa, let me get this straight. Jira admins have been requesting this feature a dozen times over 15 years and Atlassian "...do not reasonably expect to implement it in any future iteration of JIRA." Instead they want users to take an extra step of also making a comment with the user tagged so they know they were added as a Watcher?

They call that "sufficient" but you know what I call that?  LAZY!

I cant believe I'm going to have to manually script this when the system can easily do an action -> email.

"We've made the decision to close this request, as we do not reasonably expect to implement it in any future iteration of JIRA. Adding another event that triggers an email notification adds more complexity to JIRA's notification system. The existing options for notifying a user about an issue (using the Share button or @mentioning them in a comment) are sufficient in most cases and leverage existing patterns."

Just once I would like to come across one of these feedback issues and see Atlassian comment "Yes, we agree and will fix this issue immediately!". The problem is we're all using Jira when we should clearly be using something else that actually does what we need.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for voting and commenting on this issue. Your feedback is key to helping us understand how you use JIRA so we can continue improving your experience. We have reviewed this issue over the last few days.

We've made the decision to close this request, as we do not reasonably expect to implement it in any future iteration of JIRA. Adding another event that triggers an email notification adds more complexity to JIRA's notification system. The existing options for notifying a user (using the Share button or @mentioning them in a comment) are sufficient in most cases and leverage existing patterns.

I understand that our decision may be disappointing. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Dave Meyer
dmeyer@atlassian.com
Product Manager, JIRA Platform

Sorry for the confusion. I don't work for Atlassian, I was speaking from the point of view of another deployed instance of JIRA.

And I meant that my organization has considered removing the ability for any user to "manage watchers" in order to add other people to the watch list for an issue. The @mention and auto-watch features have reduced (but not eliminated) the need for us to manually add a list of people to a watch list.

I would echo what Ryan just said. Please do not remove the ability to add other watchers.

Alex, if you are saying you would remove the ability to add watchers from Jira (and not just change the Manage Watchers permission for your organization), I would strongly recommend against that. We have lab personnel and also sales people that interact more via email than logging in. They may not respond to a ticket but want to see when others do. They appreciate when our customer service, marketing, etc. add them as watchers.

Between @mentions and auto-watch, both which were recently introduced we've considered removing the ability for users to add others to the watch list.

If a user need to notify someone a one-time @mention notification is ideal, and then that person can decide if they want to be on the watch list, or if they interact with the issue then auto-watch will add them.

Finally, to be pedantic, this isn't a bug. It's a feature, and one that doesn't really make sense anymore, in my opinion.

As I'm unsure of any other mechanism to contact you (Dave), I'll add a further comment here in the knowledge that the other 133 watchers may want to add something (or perhaps to shout me down)?

My user base has made much noise about this irksome bug.

With 228 votes on what appears from the outside to be a trivial item to fix in a patch, I'd ask that you consider being more responsive to your customer base and fix this.

I fail to understand how this could lie on the back burner for over 10 years!?

John

I need to add my voice to those requesting this 'feature'.

This appears to be a simple change in Jira using pre-existing features.

My organization is reluctant to add spend on Add-ons supplied by third parties, especially for something as simple as this.

We feel that it is a fair assumption to expect this form of fix/enhancement to be delivered under out support agreement in timely fashion.

This was opened in 2004!?

Hi Jonas. I completely understand. There are quite a few JIRAs that fall into the same category.
Thanks
Paul

Hi, Paul

Thank you. I was a bit confused about the pricing too, and 400<700 but still a hefty price for 2 notifications. The big problem isn't the money in our case but the fact that these 2 notifications needs special care when doing a an upgrade or update to make sure the plugin still plays ball with the rest of the deployment. I am grateful you put your time into making the plugin (and updating the prices) as it seems to cater for a lot of peoples needs, but i rather see atlassian follow what people have voted for the last 11 years and make sure jira comes this way out of the box.

Kind regards

Jonas

Hi, I have the Notify Watcher plugin which solves a lot of these problems mentioned in this JIRA. If anyone is interested I have lowered most of the prices, some by a large amount. Also for the month of February if you use the link: https://promo.atlassian.com/G39EMT you will receive an additional 15% discount.

Jonas not too sure if you were looking at the 250 or 500 user licenses (not sure why they were both $700) but they are now $250 and $400 respectively (plus 15% off with the promo link above).

I think i speak for a lot of people when i say that $700 (in our case) is a lot of money for 2 closely related notifications out of the hundreds that already exist nativly in the system. Additionally this reminds me a lot about the ability to rename users in jira-feature that was also one of the top voted issues with over 10 years on it's neck once finally resolved, so i am not losing hope yet.

I guess it's unlikely for most of the voters to buy a plugin for a small little notification that could be done without much effort directly in the product, because of the already existing notification system. IMO that would be a bad decision. Sorry folks at Redmoon!

IMO highly unlikely, since there's a paid plugin

Another long running issue that a lot of people want and that should be fairly simple to implement. Could it atleast be scheduled for a version?

What is needed at least for me as an Admin feature that sends email when watcher is deleted. And the user who deleted the watcher will not have option to not send notice

In our case we have developers who removed watchers that should not have been removed.

Hi, I have created a plugin that allows you to send emails when adding or removing watchers and also to send an invite to let them know about an Issue. The content of the email and subject are configurable.

The plugin (paid) is called "Notify Watcher" and is available from the marketplace at: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.redmoon.jira.notify-watcher.

Please contact me if you have any problems or feature requests.

Thanks
Paul

While there are workarounds for notifications when need to add watchers, there is no workaround while watcher is deleted. So my vote is for adding at least notification when watcher is deleted.

I agree with you, but I don't understand why it shall be so hard!
I mean, what is the difference in ignoring to pull information or ignore the same information that came via spamming? In my book the result will be the same to the project (or whatever is the stakeholder in this)
My mantra is always Pull rather than Push and I try to challenge the sociologically forces that are behind it! It is my strong belief that an organization where people take responsibility for what information they need to do their job always wins over an organization where information is broadcasted!

The "alert-to-pull" approach doesn't always work (sociologically), unfortunately.

This functionality already exists!
But in a much better way than "pushing" the watch attribute onto someone.

Use the Share-functionality (i.e. the envelope-icon up in the right corner)
Add all the users you want to notify about the issue and in the message box you type in something like:
"This issue is important, please watch it for any updates!"

The receiving users will open the issue from the email they got and decides themselves if they want/need to watch the issue ("pull instead of push" is always to prefer)

Much better approach in my opinion! And no home-made customizations are needed and no waiting for features never being implemented

+1 for this feature to be added asap. Thanks.

Trying to migrate Bugzilla currently and this is a feature users don't want to miss in JIRA...

I'm working with a large team of 30+ people and adding watchers to issues is very common.
Please - can this be implemented?

We would like to have this feature too...

Wow. This wine is 8 years old - and still tasty.

We had to adapt the class "com.atlassian.jira.web.action.issue.ManageWatchers" (Jira 4.3.4)
A small part in the method "doStartWatchers"

[...]
if (isUserPermittedToSeeIssue(user)) {
          watcherManager.startWatching(user, getIssue());
} else {
          badUsersFound = true;
          addErrorMessage(getText("watcher.error.user.cant.see.issue", userName));
}
[...]

has been proudly "extended" (i.e. hacked):

[...]
if (isUserPermittedToSeeIssue(user)) {
          watcherManager.startWatching(user, getIssue());
          GenericValue issue = getIssue();
          Map mappy = issue.getAllFields();

          SendTestMail mail = new SendTestMail();
          mail.setTo(user.getEmailAddress());
          mail.setSubject("You have been added into the watchlist ["
              + mappy.get("key") + "]");
          mail.setMessage(JiraUrl.constructBaseUrl(this.request) + "/browse/"
              + mappy.get("key"));
          try {
            mail.execute();
          } catch (Exception e) {
            addErrorMessage("I could not inform the new watcher. "
                + e.getMessage());
          }
} else {
          badUsersFound = true;
          addErrorMessage(getText("watcher.error.user.cant.see.issue", userName));
}
[...]

It is so so so ugly, but does its job for us.

This relatively small enhancement has been repeatedly requested by JIRA users for over 7 years!
Does that not carry any weight? This public issue tracker is an embarrassing use of JIRA.

1. Email Notification when adding a watcher is the core feature request here.
2. Invites to become a watcher should be treated as an extension to the watcher feature (and should probably be raised as a separate issue).

I also would love this feature.
It gets cumbersome having to add a comment saying "Adding Watchers" so that they get notified.

Tell me please. Are there plug-ins that perform this task?

We had this functionality in our previous ticketing system. We used it quite a bit to let key managment know of issues. The message simply stated that <user> has made you a watcher on this issue. Then it contained the normal issue summary information (created). There was also a link to stop watching the issue.

Yes, this feature would be great to have, it is annoying to have to alert the watcher, kind of defeats the purpose.

Please implement this, to add a checkbox where you can select to notify or not should be great!

+1 from me as well. Here's a hypothetical situation which illustrates the need for this feature:

• "User A" creates a ticket
• I take it
• "User B", (not the ticket requestor) emails me directly with information allowing the ticket to be resolved
• I resolve the ticket with an explanation/comment
• I realize no notification was sent to "User B", so I add him as a watcher

Because "User B" was added after the ticket was resolved he receives no status update!

Any updates on this? We just moved to Jira from Bugzilla and this is sorely missed functionality. It is distressing that so many of the improvements I have voted on do not seem to be acted upon by Jira, even if the issue has hundreds of votes.

Any news on that ?
That would be a nice feature !

This is a wonderful option that can be implemented right away. I am voting for this issue and will inform other of my friends to do the same so that we can collect as many votes as possible for atlassian to resolve this. Also once JRA-5494 is taken care of, next issue we may face is JRA-5658. When we are adding a watcher to an issue the list of users shown should contain only allowed users. Its better to vote for JRA-5658 as well for quicker resolution.

On the same note, notifications should be sent if someone (other than the watcher) removes a watcher from the list.

Choice of simple ways to enable this in the "Manage Watch List" view:
a) add an additional button "Add and notify" beside the "Add" button
b) add an additional button "Notify new watchers" before the "Remove" button, with the new watchers pre-selected
c) add a checkbox (pre-selected) "notify newly added watchers" above the "Add" button.

This has been requested for years now... It can't be that complicated to simply send an email to the new watcher... It's really painful to comment on an issue every time you add someone to the list just so that person gets notified.

This will be a great feature, especially in an environment where users get added to the watchlist quite often. The feature has been requested from 04.

Can someone from atlassian please let us know whether it will be implemented or not. Also add the votes from (This issue relates to .......) that way there will be enough votes.

Happy new year. What can I do on my end to get Atlassian to commit to getting this done before 2010? I am aware of workarounds but to me this issue is something that should have been dealt with 5 years ago.

We switched from bugzilla, and this feature is sorely missed. If a new watcher is added, they should get an email about it. A change to the watcher list should be handled like any change to the issue, people should know about the change, and what the change was.

First I must say, I have very little complaints about JIRA. But this definitely has my vote as well as JRA-5493. So, as of now, that makes it running total of 164 happy voters if/when this glaring usability problem gets fixed. Can I bribe anyone with free beer?

I have a new user complaining about this bug today. Sigh.

As mentioned in JRA-5493 "Ability to add watchers during issue creation" I think this feature would remove the need for the ability to add watchers during issue creation, solving more than 130 votes in one fix! Please schedule this, it really seems like a basic feature people need.

Similar to William Crighton - 20/Feb/05 solution above, I have proposed an approach in the duplicate issue JRA-14619 Send email when adding watchers:

A possible solution is to add a "Send Email notification" button (similar to the "Remove" one), and also have the checkboxes of the newly added watchers to be selected by default.

I understand your frustration and desire for this feature. If you are interested in how we determine which features will get done and when please have a read of this document, http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+and+Improvements

What do we have to do get this added?

FWIW, we 'd like to have this watcher auto-notification feature too.

We would really like this feature as well.

What do we have to do to get this on your product road map?

Thanks!!!

Is there any ETA as to when this functionality will be added? It was raised almost three years ago. It seems like the basic functionality (notify people when they've been added as a watcher) should be pretty simple to implement and cover 90% of cases. Even just a tick box "notify person" (defaulting to "yes") would be great.

Everyone here has said "oh, I hadn't realised people weren't notified" - so it's affectively resolution time badly as people believe that others are aware of a problem when they are not.

We recently switched to Jira (previously Bugzilla) and we've made a stab at using the watchlist to add and remove people from a list that gets email notification. Essentially we're using it the same way we used the bugzilla cc-list. However, currently it's a little messy because we have to make a comment on the issue every time the watchlist is updated.

I really like the suggestions I've seen on this issue for adding an "Invite" notification to the user(s) that were added to the watchlist. This way they receive an alert that they were added without everyone on the list getting email spam.

I am really trying to avoid recreating the bugzilla cc-list with a custom field in Jira because it feels like a step backwards. Please enhance the watchlist with a notification event for new watchers!