Why is unwatching a ticket being considered as an action of updating the ticket ?

Tejas Chandrashekar

Consider the following filter :

assignee = currentUser() OR reporter = currentUser() OR watcher = currentUser() OR comment ~ currentUser() OR worklogAuthor = currentUser() ORDER BY updated DESC
The fetches all my tickets and sorts them in descending order.

Lets say, there's a ticket that was closed a month ago. The ticket did not belong to me in any way and I was just watching the ticket to keep track of its progress.

Now, today, I unwatched the ticket. This action was considered as an action of updating that ticket, and now, because of that, this ticket is showing up on the top of the filter list since its updated date has been changed to today's date.

Ideally, watching and unwatching should not be considered as an action for the ticket being updated, as I do not see that logged anywhere in the ticket's workflow or ticket history.

So, I wanted to know if this is the right functionality or if this is something that needs to be taken care of ?

Jason U

 Hi Tejas,

That’s actually expected behavior in Jira Cloud. When you watch or unwatch an issue, Jira treats it as a minor metadata change — technically, it’s still considered an update to the issue’s properties (similar to changing a label or linking/unlinking).

However, it doesn’t appear in the issue history because it doesn’t modify any field or workflow state. The updated timestamp is refreshed because Jira records the change in watcher data behind the scenes.

There’s currently no native way to exclude this from the “updated” sorting logic, but you could work around it by using a JQL filter like:

 

<span>ORDER BY updated DESC, lastViewed DESC<br></span>

or by excluding “watcher-related” updates in reports and dashboards if accuracy of last modification is critical.

It’s a small quirk of how Jira tracks issue metadata rather than a bug.