Confluence E-Mail notification spam
Asked by Cerno B:

At our company, we are using the Confluence Wiki and many people got annoyed by the amount of notifications they receive for Wiki edits because apparently everyone left the notify checkbox on all the time.

So our tech team found a way to modify the page so that saving without notification is the default, which now results in people making lots of edits of which the wiki moderators will not get notified (edit: they use No Email Storm).

Is there a cleaner solution? I would suggest two ways of fixing this, would you agree or am I missing something that is already in place?

1) In the e-mail options, add a checkbox "notify for all changes" which when checked will send you a notification even if the author did not tick the notification box.

2) In the e-mail options, add the possibility to get a daily update on all changes made to watched wiki pages (even those that did not have notifications active). You could even allow the user to choose a frequency for these updates (e.g. every x hours, every day, every week, etc). I know there is a daily update for special interest mails but this is different: I would like to get a separate mail for changes in any wiki I am watching.

I am responsible for keeping my wiki space correct and up-to date (it contains a manual) so I would need a way to monitor all changes, regardless of whether the author chose the notify option. At the same time I understand that most people don't want to receive a large amount of spam, so I think in the end both options would solve the dilemma.


Answers:
author: Todd Winton
body: Jan,

We use the addon Notifications for Confluence (<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.adaptavist.confluence.enterpriseNotifications/server/overview>)

This addon provides additional options for watching spaces, pages, and decendants. It also provides the ability to manage watchers. This provides the user and space owners the ability to more granular manage notifications.

comments: author: Cerno B
body: Thanks for the input, I think we are using the same Plugin, but this is not what I meant.

I am having the issue that there is no way to be notified of all changes to a wiki space, as it is only possible to be notified on the ones where the author decided to send a notification.

Btw, I opened a ticket for this:

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-57561>


author: Sandy Johnson
body: Jan

There is the 24 hour report. This gives you a listing of all the pages that have been modified in the last 24 hours including those where the editor decided not to notify watchers. The limitation here is that it only reports the last edit for each page. So if a page get 3 edits by more than one person in that span, you'll only see the most recent one listed.

Thanks, Sandy


author: Cerno B
body: That's more like it. The limitation to the last post is a nuisance but I can work around it by looking in the page history.

Thanks for the input. I'll try to get our tech guys to install that plugin and report back if it works.


author: Cerno B
body: Uh, I can't find the 24 hour report. Is that a plugin? Unfortunately I have no access to our confluence myself, so I can't look at whether it's a default setting somewhere.

I googled it a bit and it seems that the 24 hour report gives you an update of the whole wiki, which is huge in our case, so limiting the results to watched pages only would be great.