Separate notification settings for Watcher and Reporter

Sepideh Asadi

Currently, in Personal Settings → Notifications, Jira groups Watcher, Reporter, and Assignee under a single category called "relevant work items".

I would like the ability to configure notifications separately for each role. For example:

• Receive notifications as Reporter
• Receive notifications as Assignee
• Receive notifications as Watcher

As a user, I may want to follow issues I'm watching while avoiding the large number of notifications generated solely because I am the reporter of other issues.

Having separate notification preferences for these roles would provide finer control and help reduce notification noise

Javier Martínez

Hi Sepideh,

This is a valid use case, and I agree that having more granular control here would be useful.

The important distinction is that Jira currently has two different notification layers:

• Project notification schemes determine who is eligible to receive a notification for a given event. At this level, Reporter, Assignee and Watchers can already be configured independently.
• Personal notification preferences determine which notifications an individual user wants to receive. This is where the limitation you describe exists: Jira groups work items where you are the assignee, reporter, or watcher under the broader "relevant work items" preference.

So, while an administrator can configure Reporter and Watchers differently at project level, an individual user cannot currently express a preference such as "notify me when I'm a watcher, but not simply because I'm the reporter" across their Jira notifications.

From a product perspective, I think separating these roles in the personal notification preferences would make sense, particularly in larger Jira environments where users may report many issues but deliberately watch only a small subset.

One consideration would be how these preferences interact with project notification schemes: the project scheme should still define the maximum notification audience, while the personal preferences act as an additional user-level filter.

So I would see this as a reasonable feature request for finer-grained personal notification controls, rather than something that can currently be achieved through the existing Personal Settings.

Hope this helps clarify the current behaviour.