Force-subscribe users to watch all blogs in a space
Asked by Ann Marie Guzzi:

Hi there,

At an old company, we used a locally hosted version of Confluence. There, I was able to force subscribe users to watch all blog posts in space. We were using the blog to communicate product releases.

I'm at a new company that uses the cloud version of Atlassian products, and this feature seems to not be available. I can either subscribe someone to the whole space or to a single page. However, I don't seem to be able to subscribe someone to just the blog posts in the space. Is there a way to do this? Or a workaround?


Answers:
author: Keith Sottung
body: I really needs this too... as described by Ann Marie Guzzi in a comment dated Sep 14, 2021. Basically I think Ann Marie is asking for a Space Admin level permission to force user to the yellow highlighted option. The one highlighted in green is a setting I like to have space admin override permission. Sometimes content in the space SHOULD NOT BE COPIED TO AN EMAIL!!!

![space over ride permission to space users.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/245555i3F02411A90F7BE31/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "space over ride permission to space users.png")


author: Sara Beyer
body: [@Ann Marie Guzzi](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4552840) Could you please let me know how you were able to force subscribe users to a blog in a Confluence space when the instance was locally hosted?

Thank you,

Sara


author: Kishan Sharma
body: Hi [@Ann Marie Guzzi](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4552840) Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You can restrict a blog post so that it is only available to specific users or groups. So you can create a group in confluence eg: Blog-watchers, and add users to that group. When you create blog posts, just add view access to this group (eg: Blog-watchers) so that they get notifications about it.

comments: author: Ann Marie Guzzi
body: Hi [@Kishan Sharma](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/554991) , this isn't what I meant unfortunately. I don't want to restrict the blog post - I just want to be able to "force" basically all of our users to watch a blog space, in order to use it for effective communications.


author: Kishan Sharma
body: When you say all users do you mean all the confluence users in your site ? If yes, then you can add view permissions to "confluence-users" group in your space containing the blog. This way they will get the notifications whenever a new blog is published.


author: Ann Marie Guzzi
body: Yeah, but won't that update them whenever any updates to the space are made, and not just to the blog? I just want them to get notified when a new BLOG is posted, not when any changes are made to the space.


author: Kishan Sharma
body: Thats true, as a workaround you can create a dummy user with an email address set to a mailing list so you can add your users to watch a page or blog. You just need to manage the mailing list like adding/removing users to it as necessary.

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/manage-watchers-724765356.html>


author: Ann Marie Guzzi
body: Hi Kishan - I must not be explaining myself clearly.

I want them to watch all blogs in the space. Not a page. Not the whole space - all blogs in a space.

I was very much able to do this at an old company's self-hosted version of Confluence. There does not seem to be away to do this now.

I do not think that workaround would work - I would have to publish a blog, and then add my dummy user as a watcher - but then they wouldn't get an email notifying them, since the blog would already be published.


author: Manuel Sollbach
body: Hello there,

same request here. Let's try this in other words.

It is possible to manage space viewers and add them one-by-one for the whole space. From that in mind, it would be helpfull to

1. add groups (instead of single users), and also to add them particularly to

2. the space blog (instead the whole space)

We also see the advantage in the fact that we do not need to share a particular blogpost because we want everybody to know what it's about (this way the user also does not get all details in the email view) but want the users to imediateley get the whole blogpost via email in their mailbox.

Therefore we need to manually add a user-group to the blog-watchers (because we have 2000+ users and don't want to add them one-by-one and every time a new employee starts).

I've found a [related article with a workaround](https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-add-all-users-of-a-group-as-watchers-of-a-page-or-blog-957497342.html) to that topic - but it seems to only work for particular blog-posts and not all blog psts in a space.

I would be greatful for an update.

Thanks in advance,

Manuel


Tags: cloud

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