Jira stop watching issue not working when user is the reporter

Dnyaneshwar Ramesh Borase January 15, 2017

It seems the stop watching option is not really working when the user is the one who has reporter the issue. I experience this issue where I reported a user story and I am still receiving email notifications even though I am not watching the issue any more. This doesn’t seem to be normal and I would like it to be fixed because I am receiving an enormous amount of notifications that I essentially don’t want to receive anymore (but still needs to be notified when I actually want to watch an issue).

4 answers

2 votes
Dave Bosman
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January 15, 2017

Hi Swapnashilpa,

 

The reason why you still receive notifications is due to the settings of the Notification Scheme that is used for that project. You need to be an admin to change these settings. 

These settings can be found here:

In your project click "Project settings" followed by notifications. Modify as you want but keep in mind that you change this setting for everyone and not just for yourself.

Regards,

Dave

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 15, 2017

I suspect the notification scheme says to notify "reporter and watchers", so you're getting the mail because you're the reporter.

Tanya Gordon
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November 14, 2017

Hi Nic,

I'll join the same problem and would like to explain more.

We've fixed the notification scheme to exclude the reporter from all notifications (because in our system the majority of issues are reported by the same person, but he doesn't want to be notified on every update). BUT, the problem is that the reporter is by default also a watcher, and watchers do receive all notifications, so the problem persists.

Any idea how to fix this?

Alexey Matveev
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November 14, 2017

Hi,

Go to system-> user default settings and uncheck autowatch own issues.

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Tanya Gordon
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November 15, 2017

Hi Alexey,

Thanks for your fast reply! 

I've changed the autowatch own issues setting to 'No' but unfortunately, this is good only for new issues. The old ones, I've reported are still watched by me and I can't unwatch them. Is this a bug? 

Alexey Matveev
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November 15, 2017

No, it is not a bug. The settings work only on new issues. If you have Adaptivist Scriptrunner or Power Script, you could write your own script to remove watchers from old issues.

Tanya Gordon
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November 15, 2017

So, I would be able to unwatch the issues via script but not manually or using bulk unwatch? 

Is there some mechanism in JIRA, that the script runner is able to override, and the UI is not? I'm not really sure I understand the difference...

Alexey Matveev
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November 15, 2017

You would run the script only once. Just to unwatch reporters for all issues. Then you do not need this script anymore. New issues would work fine.

Joy_Mather April 3, 2018

copied from JRASERVER-65109

Another workaround to stop watching individual issues with this problem that worked for us:

  • Click "Stop watching this issue"
  • Click "Start watching this issue"
  • Click "Stop watching this issue" again

This also worked using Bulk Change:

  • Bulk change the issues selecting "Stop watching issues"
  • Bulk change the issues selecting "Start watching issues"
  • Bulk change the issues selecting "Stop watching issues" again

this worked for me

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Louie Christie August 22, 2018

 

I wonder if this is a UX (user experience) issue that needs fixing, rather than a technical issue?

Perhaps the user interface needs to adhere to this mental model:

WHEN I (a Jira user) click 'Stop watching' on a Jira issue,
THEN I (a Jira user) stop receiving any e-mails and/or notifications about that issue. 

Which differs from the system designer's model of adhering to notification schemes (which are only editable by a system administrator).

Supporting evidence user's perceive this as a problem:

Supporting academic reference(s) for the hypothesis:

-

Anecdotally, I have experienced this issue in a couple of workplaces on many projects, and, in my experience, in response to this UX issue, users tend to:

  • ignore/hide/disable all Jira notifications
  • stop commenting on Jira tickets
  • use other ways of communicating with the team that have the disadvantage of not being tied to a Jira issue number by default
1 vote
CodyDunlap February 28, 2019

You can also run a JQL query using "issue in watchedIssues()" and bulk edit > stop watching. Doing this in conjunction with changing notifications to only go to watchers, not the reporter, fixed it for me. 

Rasmus Vedel September 4, 2019

negative :-( 

Bulk edit doesn't help. Even watch --> unwatch doesn't help for me :-(

 

Disclaimer: It might be, that I'm running on an older server...

 

0 votes
Dick September 1, 2022

Older issues can be unwatched using JiraPS (Jira Powershell) commands:


Import-Module JiraPS
Set-JiraConfigServer 'https://yourJiraInstance'
New-JiraSession -Credential $cred

Get-JiraIssue -Query 'project = "YourProject" '| Remove-JiraIssueWatcher "YourName"
0 votes
Goran Dermeta February 6, 2019

I can't believe that the triple trick did solve this issue. Really good catch Joy.

This definitely is a UI issue, as it is totally not intuitive if I want to stop watching an issue, it doesn't matter what are the settings behind, I just disabled notifications, especially if the issue is already closed.

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