Turn off default auto watch in 3.5?

[Emily Johnson]

Does anyone know if you can change the default setting in Confluence 3.5 so that people do not have watches auto-added to pages that they create or edit? This will keep us from having every individual go uncheck this box manually.

Thanks,

Emily

[Mark Hrynczak]

The config lives in an XML file: <tt><confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/confluence-x.x.x.jar/preferences-default.xml</tt>.

You need to change the boolean value to false, thus:

<preference type="Boolean">
       <name>confluence.prefs.watch.my.own.content</name>
       <value>false</value>
   </preference>

Then place it as <tt><confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/preferences-default.xml</tt> and restart Confluence.

For more details on modifying jarred config files, please refer to this doc: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Editing+Files+within+JAR+Archives

[Akeles]

I see that users can turn on/off via the instructions at

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Subscribing+to+Email+Notifications+of+Updates+to+Confluence+Content#SubscribingtoEmailNotificationsofUpdatestoConfluenceContent-TurningAutowatchOnorOff

[Akeles]

It will be good to have this as configurable on the UI instead of the xml file.

[Emily Johnson]

Yeah, it would be nice to have it configurable via UI---we have a hosted instance so I can't modify jar files myself.

[Colin Goudie]

Hey emily, have a look at this link, http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Subscribing+to+Email+Notifications+of+Updates+to+Confluence+Content From those docs though it only seems to discuss setting setting it on/off per user

[Akeles]

Hi Emily,

Please check out http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Subscribing+to+Email+Notifications+of+Updates+to+Confluence+Content#SubscribingtoEmailNotificationsofUpdatestoConfluenceContent-TurningAutowatchOnorOff

[Jon Verville]

Here is a quick solution I put together to disable autowatch on particular pages. It is done by adding a macro to the content of a wiki page. http://jonverve.posterous.com/confluence-control-auto-watching-behavior