Why is Jira Autowatch Rules no longer working in On-Demand?

Question

Something recently changed in the JIRA On-Demand ecosystem and now Atlassian Labs Autowatch Rules is  broken.  We've contacted support and they've tried disabling and re-enabling the plugin as well as clearing the cache but it's just no longer working.  This is terrible news and we heavily utilize this awesome feature.  Atlassian support can't do anything further - who is the person that can help us here?

p.s. as an aside, when you sign up for JIRA OnDemand, you get a bunch of add-ons preinstalled, maybe you shouldn't preinstall the labs items if you aren't going to support them.

Rob_aixam0 · Answer

@Greg Anderson, I just logged into my JIRA cloud admin panel and now see that Autowatch rules (at least the UI) is working now.  The UI has been non-functional for us for months.  As a solid workaround, what we've started using is JIRA Admin > Issues > Notification Schemes to automatically add a new user group called "Watchers" to virtually all the notification possibilities (we're email masochists).  The "Watchers" user group we created is a bunch of users that want to be notified.  I now find this to be a lot more flexible and useful than Autowatch rules.  I'd encourage the same to anyone because I don't know if the next JIRA update is going to break the Autowatch add-on.

Greg Anderson2 · Answer

Rob, did you ever figure out how to get this working?  We too are JIRA cloud users, and while I can setup the autowatch rules with JQL, they don;t fire or create watchers on the issues

Rob_aixam0 · Answer

Hi Jose,

To be fair, we tried contacting support and were flatly told that "Autowatch Rules" is an unsupported labs feature - although it bears the "Atlassian" name.  I will try the "Got Feedback" suggestion as I'm desperate to get this working again since we heavily utilized it.

It's too bad that a standard update to OnDemand is going to routinely break plug-ins like this.

-Rob