Daily Digest email will replace "Confluence changes in the last 24 hours"

[#1]

Hi Community, I’m Nancy a PM on Confluence Cloud.

I want to make you aware that effective end of September 2023, Confluence will no longer send email notifications called “Confluence changes in the last 24 hours” (see image below).

Currently, some organizations have this email turned on where users see changes and comments of all content they have access to view over the past day. This email is being now being replaced by the Daily Digest which includes all the same notifications in a cleaner and more organized format!

I’m excited to announce that in the Daily Digest we have added links to space, pages/blogs, comments, reactions, and edits to all the pages and spaces you watch over a 24 hour period. Instead of having two sets of emails that are very similar, we’ve consolidated to one and moving forward new features within email will be put on Daily Digest to help our customers improve their workflow. Customers will be able to reduce noise and increase their productivity through more relevant emails!

If you are currently using the “Confluence changes in the last 24 hours” email to catch up on your daily updates, please make sure that you have Daily Digest turned on in your Personal Settings (shown below). Your Daily Digest should be on by default unless you have explicitly chosen to toggle it off.

To check that you have Daily Digest on:
Visit: Profile picture-> Settings-> Email
You can customize your Daily Digest to receive notifications about newly created pages in spaces that you're watching, updated pages (edits), or both.

How to obtain your updates from spaces that you care about in your Daily Digest:

1. Click on the space name
2. Click on Watch all content in the space 

3. (Optional): Disable real time notifications if you only wish to do get those notifications in Digest 
Profile avatar-> Settings-> Email--> uncheck Content I own/Content I'm watching 

We are excited for the continuing evolution of Confluence notifications and our commitment to providing the best collaboration experience for our users. Please let us know if you have any questions! 

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Nancy Shao I notice that your text says You can customize your Daily Digest to receive notifications about newly created pages in spaces that you're watching…

but the text under the New pages checkbox says newly published pages.

Can you clarify this, since there is a difference between created and published?

[Nancy Shao]

Hey @Barbara Szczesniak great question! There is no difference between created and published pages, they mean the same. I'll go change that in my article. 

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Nancy Shao Well created pages are drafts that you can't link to and other people can't see until the first time you publish them. I thought about this because, in yesterday's digest, someone had asked how they could be notified when someone created a page.

[Talha Aras]

Greetings to all,
I leave a comment to follow the topic closely. Regarding the statement made, there is a similar disruption in our own field that we use in the company.

I'll wait until the end of September and see if the issue stems from the ingredients in this statement.

best regards,
Aras,

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

The Daily Digest has really gotten so good, so this is great news @Nancy Shao!

We had to make a little video teams can use to share the news!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Aq1MO5njuos

[Nancy Shao]

Thanks for the review, @Matt Reiner _K15t_ ! Glad you are enjoying it. 

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

I just wanted to mention that as an alternative, you can send custom notifications with the Better Content Archiving app as well.

I am actively using this notification which at 01:00AM sends me the customized list of the pages and blog posts created or updated on the previous day:

Its advantage vs the built-in feature is that I have a lot more configuration possibility like customizing the schedule (Cron), the CQL query, the email subjects and body, the recipients. Also, I can use this notification in certain spaces only and not use in others.

[Penny Waterson]

We will miss the subscribe to daily updates in our org and don't want to have to add to our users workloads by having them watch all spaces to get the Daily Digest. @Aron Gombas _Midori_ we are trying out your Better Content Archiving - do you have an email template similar to existing OOB Daily Updates template?

[Jeannine Hooper-Yan]

When you first introduced this “Daily Digest” it had a key and critical flaw that it ONLY includes Spaces I WATCHED and NOT all spaces where I had ACCESS.  I do NOT watch all spaces I have access to because it would flood me with notifications I don’t need. But, in my role I do need to be aware of all activity so I can follow up where appropriate. Did you fix this? Or is this like the “new” editor that doesn’t support key functions like “attach a document once and link it wherever you need to so there is only 1 master copy”. Please - stop removing key functions used my power users. 

[nigel weinronk]

Is there anyway to link daily digest to spaces I follow ?

[Anne-Sophie G]

Hi @Nancy Shao , 

Your sentence makes me confused:

This email is being now being replaced by the Daily Digest which includes all the same notifications in a cleaner and more organized format!

How is this new option that you offer, the same?

With your new option, in order to get an idea of what is trending in the company, I'll need to watch each and every space and then I'll get flooded by many notifications that I don't need over the course of the day. 

So instead of one digest email per day to see what's trending around the company + a few emails about some key pages I really want to watch in detail --> I'll get dozens and dozens of emails...

Or have I misunderstood your upcoming change?

Thanks!

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Penny Waterson I am using a dead-simple notification email template with the notification in the previous screen. It looks like below.

Note that I use an emoji pen icon to distinguish it among other emails and it will render "[CONFLUENCE] ✏️ 7 contents updated recenty" as subject. In the body, I just added a shot explanation in the top about the purpose of the email.

If you need the full code, I am happy to help. Please open a ticket here and include my name in the ticket: https://www.midori-global.com/support/customer-support

[Keith Sottung]

@Nancy Shao Hello, 

I am happy Atlassian is taking action to improve notifications.  It is welcomed.  But this announcement leaves me confused a bit.  

• The new email you are talking about is the first of the 2 options under Daily settings? Correct? See image below.
• With this change, is this option going away? (The the one highlighted in the image below but not under daily section.)
• Will this new option... are you saying the immediate creation and sending of an email to a user who is just Watching a page will no longer be created and sent?  Instead, users will only receive a daily email about changes to watching pages? (my users would love a consolidated daily email instead of one by one... I hope your new feature is this, it sounds like it is. :-) )
• Can you clarify that if someone is @mentioned the user is still sent an email immediately? 
• Can you clarify too, that a bulk option to UN-watch is on its way?  
• Lastly, the attached setting screen below, still has a few more issues to resolve. E.g. Admin should have the option to turn ON Follow Blogs, and a Space Admin should have the option to block a user from the "show change" option. If you space is confidential, you definitely don't want the information dropped in to an email. :-O    

[Felix Lepa]

This is very, very disappointing. The "Daily Digest" contains a minuscule fraction of the changes I need to be updated about. It will list two, sometimes three changes, when there are several dozens that I wish to monitor, and do monitor via "Confluence changes in the last 24 hours." The information is not the same.

[Laurie Hickey]

I agree with Jeannine and others who have commented that the downside of the Daily Digest is that it only contains notifications about spaces/pages we are WATCHING.  Across our company we have tons of spaces, some of which I didn't even know existed, so the "Confluence changes in the last 24 hours" email option was very beneficial.  It also allowed me to be more selective about the spaces/pages I watched so that I could disable the Daily Digest and receive immediate notifications for spaces/pages I needed to more closely monitor.

[Tina Hutchinson]

I also agree that users should have an option to see a summary of ALL changes/updates in spaces they have access to, not just watched spaces. Just to be clear, in the new Daily Digest will we be given links to  "view changes" in order see specifically what changed on a page? If not, then the summary is worthless - that's why we've been using the "Confluence changes in the last 24 hours" summary instead of Daily Digest. 

[Jeannine Hooper-Yan]

@Nancy Shao  - this is TERRIBLE news and another example of Atlassian removing key functionality used by power users making the tool less useful.  I deliberately do not watch anything because it creates unnecessary noise in my inbox.  In fact - the emails generated by watching is the #1 most hated feature of Confluence in my organization.  We do not need real time / one-off notifications of changes. 

I don't need to know what happens in the moment, I need a summary of everything that happened on the day.  The Daily Digest does not do this.  The Subscribe to Daily Updates does.  

[Felix Lepa]

@Jeannine Hooper-YanEactly - the constant, immediate notifications are why I don't watch spaces and instead rely on the daily summary.

[Michael Luthardt]

@Tina Hutchinson @Laurie Hickey @Jeannine Hooper-Yan 

Searching for another replacement for "Confluence changes in the last 24 hours"  I found the macro "Recently Updated Dashboard" . If set right, it seems to show last page changes in any space. But only up to 12 it seems...

If this macro gets extendend, my users might be happy. What are you thoughts?

[Laurie Hickey]

@Michael Luthardt  Thanks for sharing an alternative.  I tested the 'Recently Updated Dashboard' macro  but the limited number of entries concerns me since our daily updates tends to exceed what is displayed with the macro.  I also tested the 'Recently Updated' macro, which allows you to set the Maximum Number of Results.  This might be a better option, however both of these are rather ugly since updates are not grouped by space as in the 'Confluence changes in the last 24 hours' email.  Having the updates grouped by space allowed me to skim over spaces that I was not interested in and focus on those that I cared more about.

[Keith Sottung]

I couldn't agree more with @Jeannine Hooper-Yan 's comment of "In fact - the emails generated by watching is the #1 most hated feature of Confluence in my organization."   The inundation of email to my users have made them very angry at Confluence.  And as the Admin when I tell them to un-watch pages, and they have 25 pages of watches and then they learn there is no bulk un-watch.  Oh gosh... the conversation to explain this have be painful. Though I still love confluence, and there is a lot to love, but any new users it is the inundation emails they see first before they can see the positive uses of Confluence. Atlassian you really need to work this front. :-)

[Tina Hutchinson]

@Michael Luthardt  Good thought Michael, but I agree with Laurie. Even if the entries weren't limited, I really need the grouping by space as well. If Atlassian truly puts all the same features of "Confluence changes in last 24 hours" into the new "Daily Digest" I'm fine with that. But too often Atlassian seems to backtrack and remove really useful features, to the frustration of their customers. It's genuinely puzzling.

[Felix Lepa]

@Tina Hutchinson  well making products is genuinely hard. And unfortunately sometimes you don't get to fully understand the impact of a change until you release it (or if you are lucky when you are about to release it - when you can still change things before affecting your users). This gets even harder when you have a large platform with a lot of different user constituencies like Atlassian does. Lots of product and engineering teams working on features and coordinating them is not easy. So I understand how we got into this situation here.

That being said -- there is a lot of valid feedback in this thread and I hope that it is making it to the right eyes and ears on the product management team for Confluence! After all, one of the core Atlassian values is.... Don't #@!% the customer...

[Merrill Oates DA Admin_Own]

@Nancy Shao Is there any way that we can get Atlassian to REVERSE this decision??

Eliminating the Confluence Changes in last 24-hours is a really BAD decision. Contrary to the pitch statement above, this mailing is Much "Cleaner" and simpler and more effective than the Daily Digest option.

The Confluence Changes shows a clean and coherent list of all of the updates for which the user has visibility.  It does not require manually "Watching" specific Spaces.

We have converted the Confluence Changes message into a distribution that goes out to all of our general access users to make sure that they are aware of recent updates to spaces that they should be aware of.  This will be broken with just the Daily Digest and its silly "G'day" greeting.  We don't need this, we just need a very simple and "clean" listing of what pages have been updated by Space – just like the Confluence Changes notification sends!

Please don't take this away.  It can't hurt to just let it continue running, can it?

I hope that others here who have raised concerns about this can support a petition to Atlassian to Keep this Feature.

[Nancy Shao]

Hi @Keith Sottung To answer your questions below:

• The new email you are talking about is the first of the 2 options under Daily settings? Correct?

Yes, that's correct

• With this change, is this option going away? (The the one highlighted in the image below but not under daily section.)

Yes this is correct as well

• Will this new option... are you saying the immediate creation and sending of an email to a user who is just Watching a page will no longer be created and sent?  Instead, users will only receive a daily email about changes to watching pages? (my users would love a consolidated daily email instead of one by one... I hope your new feature is this, it sounds like it is. :-) )

Yes, we are actually coming out with a revamped/new settings page in next few weeks- currently if you have digest turned on you will no longer get immediate/real time creation and page update emails and they are included in digest. In the new settings page, users are free to choose what they want to see in their digest and their real time updates. (For example, a user can still get page creation email immediately, as well as in their digest, or none at all). 

• Can you clarify that if someone is @mentioned the user is still sent an email immediately? 

Yes, still sent immediately 

• Can you clarify too, that a bulk option to UN-watch is on its way?  

Not in the near term but I'd love to hear more about your use case as it helps pave our roadmap!

• Lastly, the attached setting screen below, still has a few more issues to resolve. E.g. Admin should have the option to turn ON Follow Blogs, and a Space Admin should have the option to block a user from the "show change" option. If you space is confidential, you definitely don't want the information dropped in to an email. :-O    

Yes having admins set a notification schema is something we're looking into. However, I think what you're looking for is emails that contain no content (this should be coming out in the next couple of quarters and you could potentially use it to apply to all your emails going forward).