Why am I suddenly unable to watch or unwatch Community posts?

Steffen Opel [Utoolity]

I'm intensively using the 'watch' feature to keep track of Community posts I have contributed to or that are relevant to my areas of interest. Usually I watch multiple posts per day, and rarely remove a watch later on, so this is an ever growing and basically non maintained list of watches (~160 pages under 'Manage Settings -> Notifications' right now).

I've only just now noticed that the feature seems broken for me since about April 10th, which denotes the last day I have been able to apply a watch that actually sticks - the behavior since is not only dysfunctional, but also misleading as follows:

1. I can seemingly 'watch' a post just fine, and the JavaScript changes the button to 'Watching', but after a page reload the watch is gone.
2. The same goes the other way round, i.e. I can seemingly 'unwatch' a post, and the JavaScript changes the button back to 'Watch', but after a page reload the watch is still in place.
3. I've checked my inbox and indeed all replies I've received since about April 10th seem to stem from posts that I watched before that date, i.e. the watches are seemingly simply not applied anymore (rather than this just being a display regression)

I've tested this with various browsers across systems to no avail, i.e. this is consistent for me, whereas a coworker can watch/unwatch just fine still.

Any help would be highly appreciated, insofar this regression significantly undermines my ability to follow up on the assistance I'm trying to provide to other community members.

Many thanks,
Steffen

PS: I hope it goes without saying that no matter the root cause, communicating a supposedly successful outcome for any kind user interaction without a proper confirmation from the upstream service makes for an extremely bad user experience

Dominic Lagger

Hi @Steffen Opel _Utoolity_ 

First of all, I did not realize, whether you mean on your confluence instance or you mean in the atlassian community. After clicking "Watch" on your topic and reload the page, I see the problem also. The "Watch" button is there again. 

I did not recognize that. Since the April 10th, I watched a lot, but never get emails... At this point, it's only becoming clear to me why. 

The strange thing is, I get notifications per mail when I comment to a post, that is for sure. So the "autowatch" function is still good. 

Could it be connected to the fact that in April the activity feed was broken? This blog post is from April 11th. 

I'm also interessted to a solution in this.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.