Getting Jira notifications under control - best practices

[Joerg]

Hi,

a user prompted me to look closer into old and new things surrounding Jira notifications, so I did.

The problem the user has is that she is getting flooded with Jira notifications / emails because she created a whole issue structure for multiple departments, meaning she is the reporter on all of these issue (and she is also a watcher because by default Jira makes you one on your created issues).

I also noticed that, by default, in all new projects, the notification settings (even on a fresh instance and team-managed projects) the reporter is referenced explicitly, in addition to the watcher, in every possible Jira notification event.
I wonder why Atlassian decided this should still be the default.
I could remove the reporter from the default notification scheme but this would not solve the problem for team-managed projects where this is the default in all the templates, which (correct me if I'm wrong) can't be changed.

Shouldn't it be as simple as:
If the user is watching an issue, send a notification otherwise don't. 🤔

All of this results in a scenario where even if you disable all "Reporter" notifications in your personal notification settings, you will still get all these notifications as you are still watching all these issues.

Trying to find out how to best search for issues that a person is watching, it seems like you have to use JQL as there is no way to filter on that with the "basic" search, which seems not very user-friendly to me.

The above layers of UX problems make it really hard to sell Jira internally right now.

How do you manage notifications in your instances and what advice do you give users?

Any suggestions are welcome. 😊

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Joerg 

There are a few settings you might want to consider adjusting.

You can disable at a global level the default setting to make the Reporter a Watcher of an issue they create.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-the-user-default-settings/

Individual users can disable and enable this setting also by clicking on the gear icon and selecting General Settings and adjusting this option:

Users also have option to configure their notification settings individually to reduce and eliminate some of the notifications (email and in-app) they receive.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/manage-your-jira-personal-settings/

Another thing to consider is the process used by that user to "create a whole structure". There may be alternative methods that can be used that would set the Reporter to a service account rather than the person who executes the process.

Regarding making it easy for a user to find the issues they are watching, it is true that search is not available with the Basic interface. You could, however, create the JQL filter and share it with "My Organization" to make it available to everybody. The filter you would use would be:

watcher = currentUser()

[Joerg]

Some interesting suggestions. Thank you.

It's just a shame that these things are quite complicated to the average user. Every time a user has to contact a global admin to do something, it's not a good look, especially if it seems like a simple thing to them.
I wish Atlassian would streamline it a bit. I don't see any logical reason reporter and assignee have to be explicitly mentioned in permission schemes. They could just receive notifications by being watchers on the issue.

Also, there is no way to allow the reporter to be empty right?

[Ekaterina Smykova]

Hello @Joerg ,

You can put a dummy user to be Reporter. That's within the rules :)

Regards,

Katja

[Trudy Claspill]

@Joerg 

Reporter is a required field by the application itself. It cannot be left blank.