Your Confluence Daily Digest email has a fresh new look and feel!

[#1]

Hello Community!
My name is Nancy Shao, and I'm a product manager on the Confluence cloud team.

New! July 24, 2023

As of this we will be turning off “page created” notifications by default, and notifications for newly created pages over the past day will occur in your daily digest instead of immediately after they are created. 
Note: this is a gradual rollout so most should start start seeing this by July 31, and 

If you prefer to have these notifications in real time, please uncheck the New Pages option in the email settings as shown (note this setting will be displayed for most folks by new date: July 31st):

If you are wondering how to get to the page above, please go to your user profile on the top right corner --> settings --> email on the left nav. 

Over the next week, you will see an upgrade to your daily digest! When we announced the first iteration of Confluence Daily Digest, we received a lot of feedback and we’ve made it a point to improve this experience based on customer feedback since launching this feature last year.

With your new digest you’ll receive a snapshot of updates to pages and blogs that you watch and/or collaborate on. Before your digest provided you with all the edits on pages your were watching. These updates now include new page or blog creation, comments, page reactions, in addition to edits.
(Remember, Watching pages/spaces/blogs is how you receive notifications for most activity in Confluence) and have actioned upon.

We saw a lot of feedback that users wanted an easy way to see what was changed when an edit occurred, so there is now a way to review a page’s version history directly from the email, by simply clicking on the View changes link.

An overview of new comments and reactions across your workflow will appear in the digest each day, in tandem with the individual notification emails that are sent out separately. Pages will also display the spaces (represented by the folder icon) where they come from, so you will be able to gain context at a glance. 

In late June 2023, we plan to stop sending individual emails about newly created pages to users who subscribe to the daily digest. Our goal is to help cut down on inbox overwhelm. However, if you’d prefer to keep receiving individual alerts about newly created pages instead of receiving them in your daily digest, you’ll be able to mark that preference in your email settings.


See a before and after:

To summarize, you’ll be seeing the following changes to your daily digest soon:

• Summary of all actions you watch (comments, reactions, edits) or pages you own

• “View changes” link to see page history quickly

• refreshed UI that’s more readable and digestible, including a display linking the space where the page lives 

• Coming Soon: Your daily digest will replace “page created” notifications, but you can turn them back on if you’d prefer in email settings

Our daily digest experience will continue to evolve and improve, informed by your valuable feedback. Let us know in the thread below!

[Patrice Champet]

Hi!

Good news that you are working on this feature, widly used in our company to stay informed of what is goind on across the company.

Having an option to group the spaces by space category in the weekly and daily digest could help as well!

Do you think it is something that make sense ?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Because there is no "one size fits all" solution for digest emails, every team has its own requirements, some may find the Custom Notifications module of the Better Content Archiving app interesting.

It allows defining a custom schedule, a custom CQL query to collect the pages and blog to notify about, a custom email template (subject and body) and selecting the recipients (page owners, specific users, specific groups, author, last modifier, etc.):

For example, you could implement a weekly digest gathered only from 3 spaces with this CQL query:

space in (FOO, BAR, BAZ) and arch.event.lastUpdatedOn > startOfWeek()

...and schedule it for every Sunday.

If you need another digest like the list of pages created in the last month, just define another notification with a different schedule and a different CQL and a different email template. You can even group multiple notifications to a scheme and use that scheme in any space. It is extremely feature-rich and flexible!

[Kathrin]

How can you get notifications about someone replying to your comments? This was a very useful feature to have. Now it doesn't show up neither in the daily digest nor as a direct email.

[Stefan C.]

When clicking on E Mail Settings link above ( https://hello.atlassian.net/wiki/users/viewmyemailsettings.action ) 
I receive

> ... doesn't have access to Confluence on hello.atlassian.net.

[Jeff Greenhouse]

Will this new change provide a way to suppress the actual inclusion of page content in the email itself? For potentially sensitive content, I think many organizations would want the notifications to simply provide links into the secured Confluence environment, rather than sending that content out to potentially less secure email environments. 

Also, will this option be configurable at the admin level to apply to all users? 

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Jeff Greenhouse The custom notifications implementation I mentioned above uses customizable email templates. By default, the template only contains the page title and an icon.

The feature can absolutely be used for "digest" mode, as it executes a CQL to collect the page list to send. Nothing prevents you to collect the pages updated in the last 7 days, and you can even using additional filters. Or, you can even have multiple (any number of) digests. It is very flexible.

[Jeff Greenhouse]

@Aron Gombas _Midori_  I'll check it out. So are you saying that if we used that app to customize the notifications, we could turn off the default notifications? 

[Aron Gombas]

@Jeff Greenhouse I don't know your exact requirements, and devil lives in the details, but in general I would say yes! It is a very customizable approach, and because of that, it can replace the built-in digest in most situations (always?).

[Robin Oswald Schwartz]

Follow-up on this...as a page admin, are we able to turn off new page notifications entirely (as in for others)? This would provide even greater security vs. having a link to a locked page, not to mention preventing emails requesting access to locked content.

[Rick Westbrock]

It is now a week after the July 5 rollout date and I don't see the new e-mail preference settings in my Confluence instance yet. Was this date just the start of a gradual rollout?

[Nancy Shao]

@Rick Westbrock Yes this is a gradual rollout; we actually will start today, and so all customers should see this by July 24! Thanks for clarifying 

[Nancy Shao]

@Robin Oswald Schwartz Hey Robin, you cannot turn off new page notifications entirely for others however, if you lock down your page first people you mention on the page should not be getting notifications about that page. 

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

I'm absolutely loving this improvement. Time to get rid of some of my email inbox filters!
Here's a quick, easily shared, video recap of this latest improvement!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jNgYTJJlQcY

[Rob Norton]

I have users who want to continue to get real time notifications of new pages/posts but we don't seem to have the 'Subscribe to' options under our users email settings. As we to need to uncheck the 'New Pages' box in order to continue to get real time updates rather than the digest is there any workaround?

[Amit Banerjee]

How about a Weekly setting on the digest?

[Doug Robinson]

This is shockingly inadequate.

We have been promoting the "Changes in the last 24hrs" with our external auditors as our method of keeping users informed of changes to our 'documented information' for ISO 9001 purposes. This change undercuts the value of Confluence as a documentation repository. 

Obviously, no one wants to watch all content on the site or it is overwhelmingly spammy. As a previous comment suggested, I don't mind if you add the daily digest for whatever audience would like it, but please don't remove the "Changes in the last 24hrs" feature for those of us that NEED it and/or heavily rely on it. 

Regards,

Doug

[Russ Ebey]

The new daily digest design looks fresh and nice! One concern I have is regarding the “View changes” link, it now shows me an error page when clicked I hope you can fix it before the old design is suspended by the end of the month.

The link is as follows: https://projectname.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/diffpagesbyversion.action?pageId=12345678&selectedPageVersions=12

The previous design was redirecting to something like this: https://projectname.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/diffpagesbyversion.action?pageId=12345678&originalVersion=12&revisedVersion=13

Currently it gives the below error:


Maybe you need to change the url a bit more especially the `diffpagesbyversion.action` part might need to be changed if the link is no longer going to show the diff. @Nancy Shao @Doug Robinson @Amit Banerjee This is a bit urgent since the old design in going to be retired in a week.

[Nancy Shao]

@Russ Ebey Can you please post this through our support team:
https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/ 

[Jamie Hill]

Very disappointed the Confluence Changes in the Last 24 Hours is going away. The Daily Digest does not have nearly the detail of the legacy email. For instance, a new page was added to a space I own and Watch. The Daily Digest did not show that at all and the Confluence Changes in the Last 24 Hours did. I have checked my email settings to ensure I am including as much detail as I can in the Daily Digest. I hate to lose something that was working so well, at least for me.

[emillym]

Yeah, i'm having the same issue as Jamie Hill above - the daily digest doesn't include the same new pages as the changes in the last 24 hours email did, despite having new pages checked in my settings and also watching the whole space.

[Simon Boughton]

Very frustrating , I cannot get to the page to change the setting, it seems for me it does not exist. Therefore I assume that at the end of September I will loose all contact with what is been going on in the last 24 hours. Ridiculous to send an email telling people to change , in this day and age it should happen automatically.

Very very poor customer service.

[Nancy Shao]

@Simon Boughton to find your email settings page go to 

Avatar profile--> Settings --> Email 

Also Daily Digest is automatically turned on for everyone, so unless you have explicitly turned off the setting in the past, you should already be receiving Digest. There is no need to change. 

[Simon Boughton]

I do not get that route from my avatar. I get Manage Settings and that does not have email settings in it, please provide me with a link to get there ?

[Tina Hutchinson]

@Nancy ShaoThis is pretty frustrating. I'm now Watching all Spaces to be aware of any key changes and receive them in the Daily Digest summary page, with "view changes." Ok, fine. But nowhere in my Confluence Email settings have I checked anything requesting an immediate, individual email notification, and yet I just received an email notification for a space where someone Archived a page. Shouldn't page archiving be rolled in with the other daily digest updates?  Why am I receiving separate email notifications for these? The user did not tag my name, she just archived a page.

[Tina Hutchinson]

@Nancy Shao PLEASE please please... give us a way to stop calendar and comments notifications on Watched spaces! I only need a daily summary of page updates and newly created pages or spaces, I don't need a separate email notification every time somebody makes a comment in a space, or is noting PTO time on a department calendar.  Right now there seems to be no way to "unwatch" a calendar  without unwatching the entire Space - and unwatching a space means we can no longer see page updates.