"Active now" tracker in view mode - What is it and can it be disabled?

Question

I'm one of the administrators for my eployer's Confluence Cloud site. Today, this feature was brought to our attention by a developer:

It looks like it currently applies automatically to most of our overview pages, but not all. It seems to inform on concurrent users, like in the editor, but in viewing mode.

I've been trying to look around the documentation blog and the "What's new" timeline, but haven't been able to find a description of something that looks like this feature. Is it some unannounced addition that we're in a rollout test for?

Anyway, the developer in question asked if there was any way to disable this, either on a (space and/or site) administration end, or to let individual users opt out from showing up in this view. I've scoured through all the settings panels I can find, but haven't found any indication of that either.

So, what is this, and can it be disabled?

Elaine Åhlfeldt · Answer

Thank you, that was very informative!

I tried searching suggestions posts in this forum before, and couldn't find anything that seemed relevant from the post title, I'm afraid. But I'll take your advice to ask support, and add a sidenote about whether they can source it to a suggestion anywhere. Will report back what I hear.

Tomislav Tobijas · Answer

@Elaine Åhlfeldt interesting 👀

I've just checked and it seems like only some sites with Confluence Standard have this feature visible/enabled. I couldn't find this on any of our Premium sites.

I've also tried to find similar suggestions in JAC but with no luck.

The only thing I can say here is that I had a similar thing in my private Jira instance where one feature was available while on any sites we manage, as a company, this feature wasn't visible. After some time, I got confirmation that it was an experiment and that only a few sites had this feature enabled.

I would suggest reaching out to Atlassian Support with this. They can probably check it out and opt you out if you'd like to.

I hope this helps.

Btw, if you manage to find a feature suggestion for it, I would appreciate it if you would share it here.

Cheers,
Tom