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Watching updates work item?!

Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)

I just found out that watching a work item changes the "last updated" date without updating the history. I find that very odd, as you cannot reconstruct what triggered the Update in the work item.

Has that always been the behaviour in Jira Cloud? If so... WHY?!

I double checked DC: watching is a seperate action that doesn't mingle with the issue meta data - as expected.

Accepted answers

Jasmeet Kaur_xrxtha

Hello @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_

The behaviour you are seeing is expected.

I understand unwatch operations should be recorded in the history but there are a few events in Jira that are not recorded in the Issue history but change the "Updated" field:

Updation by Jira External Import
Adding/removing of a Vote
Adding/removing of a watcher
Editing an existing comment on the issue
Performing a CSV import just for attachments

We already have the following feature requests in place:

Please be sure to watch it, and vote on it, so that you're notified if this is implemented in a future release. For your reference, you can find our policy on how we prioritize feature and improvement requests at this page. You can also add a comment to the feature request to explain your specific use-case to the developers.

All comments

Rajat Pratap Singh

Hi @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_

Exactly, I am observing the same behavior.

It might be worth raising this with Atlassian Support to confirm if this is a known issue.

Regards
Rajat

Jasmeet Kaur_xrxtha

Hello @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_

The behaviour you are seeing is expected.

I understand unwatch operations should be recorded in the history but there are a few events in Jira that are not recorded in the Issue history but change the "Updated" field:

Updation by Jira External Import
Adding/removing of a Vote
Adding/removing of a watcher
Editing an existing comment on the issue
Performing a CSV import just for attachments

We already have the following feature requests in place:

Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)

Thanks for the reply.

That feature request is 12 years old so watching it will only result in "this affects me and needs to be worked on" comments from others in my inbox and probably no implementation after all.

Why would watching an issue change the Updated date though? Does that have architectural reasons? Why do we see different behaviour in DC and Cloud in such a basic feature?

Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)

Also - is there a feature request for NOT changing the date on watch/unwatch actions?

Jasmeet Kaur_xrxtha

Hello @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_

This behaviour is due to how Jira's architecture handles different types of changes:

"Updated" Date Logic: The "Updated" field in Jira reflects the last time any change was made to the issue, including changes that are not user-visible or not considered significant enough to be logged in the issue history. Adding or removing a watcher is one such change—it updates the issue metadata but is not treated as a core field change.
Issue History Logging: Jira's issue history is designed to track changes to fields that are relevant to the workflow or audit trail, such as status, assignee, summary, or custom fields. Actions like watching/unwatching are considered peripheral and are not logged in the history tab.

I was not able to find any feature request for not changing the date on watch/unwatch actions, but I would advise you to add your use case to the existing feature requests.

Thank you!

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