Enhanced Real-time Avatar Visibility - Coming Soon!

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community!

I’m Shivani Gakkani, a Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team.

We’re thrilled to roll out the ability to see users' avatars on published pages for all customers. We've expanded this feature so you can see who is currently viewing a page or blog post, in addition to already being able to see who is editing. 

By April 17, 2025 April 30, 2025 - all users should have this experience enabled. [Updated on April 15, 2025]

Note: Admins have the ability to hide avatars of viewers on published pages (to accommodate discretion as appropriate).

Enable Collaboration & Provide Teammate Visibility!

We understand that it can sometimes be a struggle to gauge when colleagues are online or actively engaged, causing missed opportunities for collaboration & frustration due to uncertain response loops.

Having real-time visibility of where teammates are working in Confluence and how they’re engaging with content can help minimize these missed collaboration opportunities. We want users to feel the collaborative nature of Confluence - and a step towards that is humanizing Confluence with familiar faces!

Teammate avatars can humanize Confluence by mapping faces to names, facilitating connections between teammates, and reducing the feeling of isolation / disconnectedness to create impactful work.

                   

On Pages – viewers will see other page viewers, while editors of the page will be able to see other editors. On Live Docs (currently in open beta) – both viewers & editors will see other viewers & editors due to the openness of this content type.

If guests and anonymous access are allowed in your organization, you will be able to see those users with clear “guest” and “anonymous person” identification for deeper visibility!

Admin Controls to Hide Avatars

While this feature is intended to help users feel more connected to their teammates and provide appropriate visibility of what teammates are doing, we understand this visibility might not always be needed - especially on sensitive content.

As of now - admins can turn this feature off for the entire site or for individual spaces, but not for specific pages.

Avatar visibility is on by default. To turn it off:

• Site-level admins can visit Settings > General configuration > Avatars on published pages

• Space-level admins can visit Space settings > General > Avatars and status > Avatars on published pages

Note: These settings only control avatar visibility of viewers on published pages. The visibility of editor avatars is a Confluence feature that cannot be turned off.

More guidance here.

We hope you enjoy this addition to the Confluence collaboration experience – let us know what you think in the comments below. Thanks!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Interesting update 👀 Thanks for sharing @Shivani Gakkani !

I've stumbled upon one question on Community related to active viewers for Databases (similar to what's currently available in Whiteboards). Do you have any insight regarding that? I guess that is not covered in this update.

[Shivani Gakkani]

Hi @Tomislav Tobijas - thanks for reaching out & sharing! Showing active users via avatars on Databases is certainly a top priority for us. Our goal to have a consistent avatar experience across different content types. More to come on this soon!

[Todd Thomas]

This is great!

We would love to similar functionality for JSM and Jira- those platforms often have multiple people viewing/editing work items and would benefit from an enhancement like this.

[Shivani Gakkani]

Hey @Todd Thomas - thanks for reaching out! I'll be sure to reach out to those teams to share this request :) 

[Todd Thomas]

Thank you, @Shivani Gakkani ! I've seen Confluence for Cloud come up with some really innovative features that would apply in the Jira world (and vice-versa), so thank you for passing along this suggestion.

We would love to have this level of visibility for work items, telling you who is looking at a work item as well as actively editing it. This is especially helpful in larger organizations for exactly the reasons you're implementing it in Cloud. Working as a team and not duplicating work makes a big difference!

[Shivani Gakkani]

Hi all! I've updated our release timing in the original post - we're now looking at April 30, 2025 as the date when all customers will have this experience enabled!