JIRA is automatically adding users as watchers

Sean Spalding

Our v5 JIRA (upgraded from v3) is automatically adding users who edit/comment/assign an issue as watchers of that issue.

This did not occur in v3 so I don't believe that this has been specifically configured to occur.

How do we stop this behaviour?

Where should I look? I've checked for Workflow functions and there don't appear to be any changes to the default Workflow. I've also checked Listeners and there don't appear to be any "extra" Listeners, just these:

Mail Listener (internal) com.atlassian.jira.event.listeners.mail.MailListener
Issue Assignment Listener (internal) com.atlassian.jira.event.listeners.history.IssueAssignHistoryListener
Issue Index Listener (internal) com.atlassian.jira.event.listeners.search.IssueIndexListener

Norman Abramovitz

You need to turn it off on a per user basis. Which version are you running?

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+5.0.3+Release+Notes#JIRA503ReleaseNotes-Autowatchissuesyoucreateorcommenton

Also Atlassian also believes they should not provide a global turn off as noted in the issue below They do note how to change the default value though in the link below.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-22070