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Bulk Unwatch pages?

BroadcomS

Is there any way to bulk unwatch pages in Confluence? With the new autowatch feature, users end up watching potentially hundreds of pages. It's extremely tedious to individually unwatch these pages. How can we remove all watches at once or selectively in bulk?

Accepted answers

Christian Czaia [Decadis AG]

We were facing the same problem. What we finally did was dropping the entries in the NOTIFICATIONS table in our database. It looked something like this since we only had to drop the notifications of the person who had initially created the Confluence layout.

DELETE FROM NOTIFICATIONS WHERE username = '<user's name>';

After that we experienced a problem that the user the user got an exception when he first tried to view his watches. After watching a random page everything was fine. I don't know if this is the "correct" way but I was looking everywhere before we decided to apply changes directly to the database.

By the way, we globally unchecked the "autowatch" feature:

Workaround

The config lives in an XML file: <confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/confluence-x.x.x.jar/preferences-default.xml.

You need to change the boolean value to false, thus:
<preference type="Boolean">
       <name>confluence.prefs.watch.my.own.content</name>
       <value>false</value>
   </preference>
Then place it as <confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/preferences-default.xml and restart Confluence.

For more details on modifying jarred config files, please refer to this doc: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Editing+Files+within+JAR+Archives

Hope this works for you

Cheers

Christian

unknown

If you have no access to the DB one could use the browser's JavaScript console

$(function(){
  $('.link-stop-watching').click();
  setTimeout(function(){location.reload();},2000);
});

With this you can at least remove all watches that are shown on the watches page. No fun if you have 110 pages of watches (like me), but better than clicking every "Stop Watching" link by hand laugh

All comments

Christian Czaia [Decadis AG]

DELETE FROM NOTIFICATIONS WHERE username = '<user's name>';

By the way, we globally unchecked the "autowatch" feature:

Workaround

The config lives in an XML file: <confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/confluence-x.x.x.jar/preferences-default.xml.

You need to change the boolean value to false, thus:
<preference type="Boolean">
       <name>confluence.prefs.watch.my.own.content</name>
       <value>false</value>
   </preference>
Then place it as <confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/preferences-default.xml and restart Confluence.

For more details on modifying jarred config files, please refer to this doc: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Editing+Files+within+JAR+Archives

Hope this works for you

Cheers

Christian

BroadcomS

Christian,

Thank you for your response and tips. That's what I was afraid of...

Shawn

Sherif Mansour

You may also want to watch/comment/vote on this issue to stay updated: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-8458

Matin Schiemann

Hi all, there is a workaround using the free descendant notification plugin of adaptivist, which removes all watches fo a space, see https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.adaptavist.confluence.descendentNotification/versions#b302

- Activate watching the page family on root page of a space (will temporarily set you as watcher on all pages of this space)

- Edit page family watches (on the root page or in your personal settings)

- Choose Remove root and all watches on child pages in the page family management page

Don't be too quick in doing this in large spaces. The plugin just does a bulk add or bulk remove on all the pages, which takes a while to finish.

At least that helped me removing my ~ 3800 watches in about 30 minutes.

Good luck.

Matin

P.S.: And don't forget to dump your trashes, might decimate your watchlist too

Stephen Deutsch2

For all the administrators suffering from this problem, I have written a pair of user macros to fit two use cases:

1. Removing a set of watchers from a set of child pages (and re-adding them, in the case of a temporary change, like moving a bunch of pages).

2. Removing watches for a particular user (or yourself) filtered by space (also with the option to re-add).

You can choose the pages you want from a list of checkboxes, so you can choose as many or as few as you would like.

Note that you must be running an installed version of Confluence (now known as Confluence Server) and have "Remote API" (under General Configuration) enabled.

They should be compatible back to Confluence 4.0, although I haven't been able to test it exhaustively.

You can find the user macros here:

https://bitbucket.org/stephendeutsch/confluence-user-macros/src

Navigate to "bulk remove watchers" and you can find the two macros. "remove watchers" is for use case #1, and "remove watches for user" is for use case #2.

Simply give them a name in the user macro browser (you probably want to select the option "Visible only to system administrators in the Macro Browser"), embed them in a page, and you are all set to go! Using them is pretty self-explanatory.

If you have any questions, you can e-mail me at stephen.deutsch@zanox.com, but I can't offer full support, so please use it at your own risk.

Perhaps this will motivate Atlassian to implement some sort of solution themselves...

unknown

If you have no access to the DB one could use the browser's JavaScript console

$(function(){
  $('.link-stop-watching').click();
  setTimeout(function(){location.reload();},2000);
});

With this you can at least remove all watches that are shown on the watches page. No fun if you have 110 pages of watches (like me), but better than clicking every "Stop Watching" link by hand laugh

Neil Arrowsmith

The javascript posted By StAn above didn't work for me on Confluence 4.3. But this did:

$(function(){
 $('a.icon.icon-stop-watching').click();
 setTimeout(function(){location.reload();},2000);
});

Thanks for the tip!

Paul Miles

This JavaScript worked for me on Confluence 5.6.6

$(function(){
 $('a.link-stop-watching').click();
 setTimeout(function(){location.reload();},2000);
});

Ethan Foulkes

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/it.logontec.dev.watchremover

unknown

thanks that is so far the best solution

William Deshaies

Working great and it's free! Also, user can do it themselves.

Gal Caspi

Do this for each space you want to apply the change:

Click "Overview" on the top left
Click the watch button (the eye icon on the top right)
Uncheck "Watch all content in this space"

rohit patel

Hi,

Should we be placing the above code on the parent page??

Regards,

Rohit

Pete Woolley_0ok55t

Get to the page, open up web inspect (chrome) and paste the code into the Script tab.

wkjl

seems to have worked

Mirko Friedenhagen

A small addendum for the JS snippet:

* I added *space watches* and want to keep these.

* So I use this:

$(function(){
$('table[id="page-watches"]').find('a[class="link-stop-watching"]').click();
setTimeout(function(){location.reload();},2000);
});

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