Why are people getting added as a watcher?

[Phyllis Zhu]

We have a user that is somehow getting added as a watcher on issues. I don't see anything in the history to indicate he is being added manually. We don't have any automation or post-function transition that would add him as a watcher as he's nowhere assigned to issues or any of our user custom field. 

anything else I can check? 

[Syauqi · Accepted solution]

Hi Phyllis,

How many issues were affected and is-it affecting specific or multiple projects?

[Phyllis Zhu]

Haven't noticed a specific pattern but it is so far just this one person within one project. 

[Syauqi]

I've raised a support ticket so that we could further dig further into this issue. We'll get back to you soon Phyllis.

[Syauqi]

Hope you don't mind me sharing the workaround for this issue on this thread Phyllis,

The auto watch was caused by an automation which assigns specific watcher after criteria are being met.

As a workaround, you can remove the users from auto watching from the automation.

Cheers, Syauqi

[Phyllis Zhu]

Thanks for your help Ahmad. 

I was suspecting possible automation, but we have so many, it was hard to dig through all of them :)

[Syauqi]

No worries Phyllis, always glad to help when things get too overwhelmed :)

[Jael Busuttil]

I am currently facing an issue with regards to a particular user being automatically selected as a watcher for issues in different projects (approx: 30 projects and 55K issues in which he is set as a watcher), without him being a reporter/assignee nor committing any actions as per the history within the issues. There is no specific pattern for this behaviour.

There should be an automated process because there are cases which this specific user is added as a watcher in 6, 7 issues at the same second.

The problem is that I don't have any idea from where this automated process is coming. I've already checked some scripts but I couldn't find anything.

To help me to find from where it is coming, I created a listener in scriptrunner to listen to IssueWatcherAddedEvent and log to a file.

When I add myself as a watcher in a issue, it shows in the logs as "http-nio-8080-exec" but for this specific user, the IssueWatcherAddedEvent is showing as "JiraTaskExectionThread".

Does anyone have any idea where I can check? Thank you. 

[Alexey Matveev]

Hello,

By default every user which reports an issue or works on it become a watcher. You can disable this feature:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-stop-being-automatically-added-to-the-watcher-s-list-when-working-on-issues-298975297.html

[Phyllis Zhu]

This person is not working on the project nor is he the reporter of any issues.