How do I remove someone as a space watcher
Asked by Greg Della-Croce:

I have a person who shows up on as a Space Watcher. It can not be managed through the Manager Watch tool. How do I remove someone from this watch?


Answers:
author: ChangJoon Lee
body: Interesting,

Simply, you can't. (Surprised)

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Managing+Watchers>

Should we ask user to stop watching the space?

comments: author: ChangJoon Lee
body: You can vote this.

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-22313>


author: Jonathan Hult
body: CONFSERVER-22313 is now resolved as of 6.0


author: Stephen Deutsch
body: The way I see it, you have two different options (unfortunately both work only for Confluence Server):

1: Install the sudo plugin. Although it is listed as compatible only until 3.4.9, we are using it successfully on 5.4.4: [](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/archive/com.adaptavist.confluence.sudo)<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/archive/com.adaptavist.confluence.sudo>

2: I wrote a user macro that allows you to remove multiple watches for yourself or another user, which includes adding/removing space watches. It requires the remote API to be enabled to remove page watches, but it works without it for space watches. You can find the user macro here: [](https://bitbucket.org/stephendeutsch/confluence-user-macros/src)<https://bitbucket.org/stephendeutsch/confluence-user-macros/src>under "bulk remove watchers" and "remove watches for user.vm"

Hope this can be helpful!

comments: author: Rick Marshall
body: Stephen, Thanks for the great macro - it's really helping to remove watches for off boarded users.   

We're running on 5.9.7 - however, we have Confluence Questions installed as well. The data is showing as "Other Content" and no method to select/remove.   

Any plans to include Questions?


author: Shannon Wright
body: Stephen, I tried out your user macro for removing watchers from spaces. I ran it and choose the user I wanted removed. When I went back to that space, I still see the user listed, but when I run the macro again for that space, that user isn't listed from the macro anymore.

Does it take some time to remove the user from the actual space?


author: Stephen Deutsch
body: Normally it removes the watch right away, but it is possible that there might be some sort of caching mechanism that causes the result to not show immediately.

Just out of curiosity, which version are you running?


author: Shannon Wright
body: I ran this against version 5.6.4

I wasn't thinking of any caching, I'll check on that.


author: Drew Bentley
body: This is a major security vulnerablity. Administrators should have the abilty to remove space watchers. We have some spaces that are limited to users, if someone who has access adds themselves as a watcher but then are removed from said space/project space, they should no longer be a watcher of said space/project.

Also, when users are removed as a confluence user, Confluence should remove their watched pages and spaces, it should be fully capable of it's own tidying up of users who are no longer a valid user.

Keeping pages they create makes sense, as you don't want content or data deleted but watching a page is and should be considered personal settings, which should be removed when a user is disabled.

This is a bug!!!!


author: AW
body: Per this related [JIRA KB article](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/sending-mail-through-administration-screen-causes-javax-mail-sendfailedexception-invalid-addresses-429490660.html), I think you can detect \& determine those usernames via this query. I was able to reverse engineer it per @Matthew J. Horn comments above. Note - we are on Confluence 5.5.3 so mileage may vary if this has been improved in future versions of Confluence.

```
-- Confluence Space watchersSELECT n.*, m.*, s.SPACEID, s.SPACENAME, s.SPACEKEYFROM [confluencedb].[dbo].[NOTIFICATIONS] nINNER JOIN dbo.user_mapping m ON n.USERNAME = m.user_keyINNER JOIN dbo.SPACES s ON n.SPACEID = s.SPACEIDWHERE 1=1-- global Space watchersAND n.SPACEID IS NOT NULL-- uncomment this line to show users who are no longer validAND m.username NOT IN (SELECT user_name FROM cwd_user)
```


author: Phuong Nguyen
body: @Stephen Deutsch - Thanks for your solution, I applied and this works very well with Confluence 5.9.x: can remove watchers on both of pages and spaces.

Excellent works... and you save my time,


author: Ed Schriger
body: This is still an issue. Using the "Manage Watchers" function described above, we can see there are two individuals "Watching this Space" (whom we cannot remove) WHO NO LONGER WORK FOR OUR COMPANY and WE HAVE DE-ACTIVATED THEIR JIRA ACCOUNTS.

There is simply no way to remove these "dead" watchers from this space.

Confluence on Demand.

Please don't give me some sort of code based solution. The product needs to work correctly.

comments: author: Stephen Deutsch
body: Hi Ed,Good news. As of a few days ago, Confluence allows you to log in as another user:<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/Cloud/2015/07/31/Upcoming+Atlassian+Cloud+Upgrade+for+week+starting+2+August+2015#UpcomingAtlassianCloudUpgradeforweekstarting2August2015-Usermanagementchanges>Using this method, you can remove the space watches for the people who no longer work for your company.It's not as nice as being able to manage it directly from the page, but it is at least now possible :)


author: Axel Gunnlaugsson
body: @Stephen, unfortunately that does not work form me. I am running on-demand.


author: Axel Gunnlaugsson
body: Indeed This is a bug!!!!

I now have a group of space watchers that no longer should have access to a space and I can't do anything to stop that. This is really bad


author: Matthew J. Horn
body: I'm just now looking into some issues we're having with notifications. There's a table in the Confluence database called NOTIFICATIONS that has entries with space IDs and usernames. I suspect these are "space watchers". Try checking your table and removing one of those lines (after backing up first!).