Disable auto-notifications for reporter?

[Juan Raimondi]

As a reporter of a specific issue, I receive notifications for every update in the issue, although I am not watching the issue (it does give me the ability to start watching it).

Is there any way to prevent this from happening? Is it something that requires administrator privileges?

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

It is mostly because the reporter is added into the notification scheme used by your project and not just watchers. Any changes to that can only be done by a JIRA admin.

[Juan Raimondi]

Thanks! Straight to the point.

[Raj Vora]

Are there specific instruction a JIRA admin can follow to modify the notification scheme to accomplish this?

Can you modify the notification scheme in such as way that it disables auto-notifications for some issues that someone is a reporter for but not others?

[Rob Gilliam]

The broken approach is that there are two methods driving notifications for an issue: the Notification Scheme for the project and the Watchers system.

This should be simplified so that there is only one system (the Watchers system) and the project-level configuration should come down to who should be added automatically to the watchers list.

Then, when it is no longer appropriate for a user to be notified of changes to an issue, this can be managed on an issue-by-issue basis by the user themselves or an admin with the Manage Watchers privilege.

Recommendations here and elsewhere to:

• change the reporter, either automatically or manually
• change the notification scheme

are invalid: changing the reporter loses important information (or hides it, at least) - it might well be useful to know whom to contact for more information on an issue; changing the notification scheme across the project is too wide an impact for something that should be manageable by individual users on an issue-by-issue basis.

[John Tian]

This is a fantastic suggestion!

[Louie Christie]

I wonder if this is a UX (user experience) issue that needs fixing, rather than a technical issue?

Perhaps the user interface needs to adhere to this mental model:

WHEN I (a Jira user) click 'Stop watching' on a Jira issue,
THEN I (a Jira user) stop receiving any e-mails and/or notifications about that issue. 

Which differs from the system designer's model of adhering to notification schemes (which are only editable by a system administrator).

Supporting evidence user's perceive this as a problem:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-65109
  https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Jira-stop-watching-issue-not-working-when-user-is-the-reporter/qaq-p/406032
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Disable-auto-notifications-for-reporter/qaq-p/73985
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-65109

Supporting academic reference(s) for the hypothesis:

• See 'The System Image' in section 1 of, The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, By Don Norman (2013) - https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I1o4DgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+design+of+everyday+things+mental+model&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjEus2LuIDdAhWKAcAKHfMXA-sQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=the%20design%20of%20everyday%20things%20mental%20model&f=false

-

Anecdotally, I have experienced this issue in a couple of workplaces on many projects, and, in my experience, in response to this UX issue, users tend to:

• ignore/hide/disable all Jira notifications
• stop commenting on Jira tickets
• use other ways of communicating with the team that have the disadvantage of not being tied to a Jira issue number by default

[Alexandra Stoneham]

I think (based on the UI only) there may be an easier way to do this?

Click the link to your profile (top right), and check under Preferences. With Autowatch disabled, hopefully you would not receive all of those emails.