Adding/deleting attachments in Confluence will no longer trigger an email notification

[#1]

Important Update (February 2, 2023):

Confluence has decided to add a setting (Go to your profile image → settings → email) where you can turn on these emails if you choose. We have started rolling this out customers today and as of Feb 7, it will be rolled out to all customers. This means the setting will be unchecked (turned off) by default on a per user basis, so if you would like to continue receiving attachment emails, please go to the below settings page and Check the “Subscribe to attachment notifications” button.

Please don't hesitate to reach out below or to support if you have any questions. 

Dear Atlassian Community,

I’m Nancy, and I’m a product manager on our Confluence Cloud team.

I want to make you aware that effective January 2023, Confluence will no longer send email notifications when documents are attached.

Currently, any time an attachment is added or deleted from the Attachments subpage or the attachments macro, watchers of that page or space will receive an email notification stating that a user added a file or deleted a file. Here is an example of that email notification.

Adding an attachment:Deleting an attachment (space admin):

The reason for this notification removal is that the Confluence notifications team has started a long-term project to revamp email notifications, bringing a series of design and product changes to notifications to help increase the usability of email notifications as well as help reduce volume. Based off of user feedback and to improve consistency, we are removing this notification. 

We apologize for any disruptions this might cause your workflow. If you are currently using this particular email, you can still manually navigate to the attachments subpage to see if anything new has been updated.

If you and have any questions, concerns, or product feedback, please contact Support here.

We are excited for the continuing evolution of Confluence notifications and our commitment to providing the best collaboration experience for our users!

[Laszlo Horvath]

The notifications are useful, but they are overwhelming and most of the time distracting. Still, I hope that the events (addition, deletion etc)  continue to be logged and a user may review them at will. 

[Arkadi Avrukin]

Strongly disagree!

If this decision is based on a few opinions, that is not a good justification. Have you asked a wider community?

"team has started a long-term project to revamp email notifications", sound strange. You wouldn't have to make people busy by just removing the existing feature, unless there is some other, actual reason. So, what's the real reason for removing it?

[Stefan Krieger]

Please don't remove it completely and make it at least optional to get these messages!

Those attached documents are esential to the content of the corresponding page. There is data, manuals etc. in there and we need to know if those are available, got updated, got accidently deleted because these pages are a cucial part for our work.
It would be a big waste of time to check each an every document manualy on a daily base for the lastest changes.

Generaly, when I'm not interested in the documents attached to it, I'm not interested in the page itself nether. In this case I will opt out from notifications completely.
Thats why I can't undestand the need to kill this notification feature at all.

[Mark Wager]

NNNNNnooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

We NEED these notifications.  Please do NOT get rid of them. At the very least, make it an option that a user can select, a profile setting, or something to allow users to keep it, if they want to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mark

[Nancy Shao]

@Stefan Krieger @Mark Wager @Laszlo Horvath 

Thanks for your feedback here- I'd love to know a bit more about your use case here (ie. do you mostly just open these and not click on it the link to the page?)- let me know if you'd be interested in chatting with me for a few minutes so that I have a better idea of how you're using this email in your org. 

Yes to @Laszlo Horvath point up above, we have done research indicating that these emails tend to be overwhelming and lack of customization adds to the frustration. We're investigating potentially adding them back later, but wanted to make sure we do it in a way that is useful for our customers. 

[Dawn Thurber]

I rely on these notifications on my confluence page to tell others in my corporation that I have attached a new analysis for them to review.  It's great - no extra emails are needed.  Employees that need to review the information I'm attaching watch the page and are notified when an attachment is uploaded.  I would love to know what my work around will be as emailing the entire company won't be an option.   

[forde.prigot]

@Nancy Shao Please do not remove this feature, I use these email to be alerted of activity.  Instead create an option to turn off/on the emails for users who do not want them. 

Who asked for this to be removed entirely?

[Dimos]

That notification is the only useful feature for the non-frequent users.

We just need to know that the IT team is doing its most important job in contractual terms (adding a daily status report).

It is totally unnecessary to train all the staff in an advanced use of the environment.  

[Mark Wager]

Hi @Nancy Shao , I'd be more than happy to chat about this with you. Thanks!

Mark

[forde.prigot]

@Nancy Shao There is some irony that I am getting email updates about comments on this thread. Are you getting rid of this feature as well and people can just periodically check for changes to the thread? If you are keeping it then you see the value that updates provide. 

Please don't remove a feature people are using without a replacement. Just add an option to turn it off so users who don't want it don't have to have it.

[Holger Schroth]

For us / me this feature is a helpful tool to keep track on different project changes, I can easily recognize that something changed and dive in if needed. If you remove this notification, please grant us a way to keep an overview when changes are done. For my work with many parallel projects is becoming a mess if I need to move to each page and recognize the changes.

[PJ Dal Pozzo]

All I can say is THANK YOU!.

We spam over thousands and thousands of users just because we deleted an image or attachment with a new version.

It's still too many email notification which you cannot turn off space by space vs you have to do globally, which is still required where the admin of the space can dictate what emails get notified vs not.

[Stefan Krieger]

@PJ Dal Pozzo 

Every user can set its own list for the pages he wants to get updates about or don't want to get informations about changes on.

So there is no need to discard this useful and - I suppose by the posts in this thread - widely adopted function.

[Christof Arnosti]

Please don't remove this feature! We rely on it to see if an updated document version has been uploaded.

A compromise could be that there is a separate "Watch Attachment"-Button in addition to the present "Watch Page" button.

[Jorge Ortiz]

Please reconsider this move. Is it really necessary to remove it while you work on improving it???

This isn't just a nice to have feature, it's one that many of us depend on to get work done so removing the email notifications is extremely disruptive.

[Robert Thomas]

"If you are currently using this particular email, you can still manually navigate to the attachments subpage to see if anything new has been updated."

So now I have to remember to go to the pages on a regular basis to find updates.  That is a terrible waste of time.  It takes all of 2 seconds to open the email notification and see if I need to take action.  

I disagree with this decision, especially since you have no workaround other than to force more work onto me.   

Removing a useful feature and not replacing it with something equivalent or better is a classic product management mistake.

[Arkadi Avrukin]

I guess the majority of users want the notifications. I believe it'll be beneficial to re-consider the decision - sometimes we make mistakes in judgement. Nothing wrong with that. The wrong thing is to insist on those decisions doesn't matter what.

As for "We're investigating potentially adding them back later" - NO, this is even worse. Please, just have a courage to step back and cancel the move right now.

[Jawann]

If you want the default behavior to be no email notification, that's fine, but it's unacceptable to remove this functionality while only offering the proposed workaround of "you can still manually navigate to the attachments subpage to see if anything new has been updated."

I hope you can understand how useless of a "workaround" this is if you have to keep track of many different pages with attachments. Let's assume it's 20 pages, although I bet it's many more for a lot of users. Are you seriously suggested that manually opening and scanning 20 different pages every...day?...hour?...is a legitimate workaround for reading one email?

Typical Atlassian product management where they apply the requirements of the few to the many.

[johnhigg]

This is AtlassianSpeak for "we are tired of storing files for people and our analytics have made it clear, if we make file uploads less useful, people will use them less."

When a feature is removed before a replacement is ready, that feature is never coming back. If they really were revamping this feature they would, you know, REVAMP IT AND RELEASE THE NEW FEATURE.

Anything that increases my need to proactively engage with a solution where the outcome is almost always 'nope, nothing changed' (ie: failure state) will reduce engagement with that solution.

[Andy]

Presumably the attachments sub-page you mean is listattachmentsforspace.action?

If so, and you're going to update it to include deletions, then this isn't going to be a big deal as there will be a record of who did what. 

If not... then this seems a somewhat questionable decision. 

[Brendan O'Brien]

So glad this is finally being implemented - though I do wish it was toggleable as others have mentioned. The current implementation has been a huge pain for our team and has led to individuals not deleting old attachments (for fear of sending a deluge of update emails).

[Chris McCullough]

This seems like a better opportunity to provide granular per-user notification preferences. Some users clearly would like to see notifications for something like this while others wouldn't. Provide that as an option in the users profile along with receiving notifications for other changes like page update, @mentions, comments, etc.

This also seems like an area where, as others have stated, you have a replacement feature ready to roll out in tandem with removing older functionality that's being replaced. Otherwise you're putting the cart before the horse.

[Robert Thomas]

Atlassian - Here's the user story you should not dismiss.  There are many users in the same situation.

I had 11 email notifications.

Of those I immediately deleted six, because I could tell from the title that I did not need to read the email.

Of the five remaining there were three I deleted after a glance at the open email.  That took about 10-15 seconds to review all.

Two required my attention.  

Without the automated notification, I would not know of the two updates that required my attention, unless the persons who made the updates sent an email to notify me.

I hope you will reconsider this decision.  I mentioned it to my team yesterday.  They were surprised and not supportive of this feature's removal. 

[Laszlo Horvath]

If we want to keep the illusion of democracy then the removal of an existing feature must be submitted to a "referendum" and the change proponents must win at least a 90% majority :-) .  I would vote to keep a feature until there is no acceptable functional replacement or personalizable setting for it.  For me, the little bell on the top right side of the browser page is sufficient to notify me about the changes and I could disable email notifications altogether while others could keep the email notifications active at will.  

[Giorgia Riboldi-Tunnicliffe]

Hi, 

this feature saves hours of my time as I need to search through at least 50-60 different pages to check if anything of importance has happened. 

Please do not remove this feature while implementing a better version of it.

G