How to receive notifications from blog post comments or changes

[Sandy Pflugfelder]

It appears that Watching a Page does not cause you to get notifications of blog posts on that page. If you Watch the Space, you will get all blog notifications. However, we don't want most of our members watching the entire space as they’ll potentially get far too many notifications about content changes they don’t need to be concerned about.

If you click on a blog post, then go to “Watching” you have options to “Watch blog post” (meaning that particular thread) and “Watch for new blog posts in this Space.” This second option initially seems promising, however it doesn’t seem include notifications for comments on those blog posts, or changes to them.

The ability for a space owner/admin to manage blog watchers has been logged as a requested enhancement (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-30644) for a number years. As of December Confluence commented that “This is something we’d like to implement in the future, but it's not currently on our 12 month roadmap.”

They further suggested looking into a plug-in that’s available for purchase on the Atlassian Marketplace that allows enhanced blog management capabilities.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.arijea.plugins.betterblogs/server/overview(https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.arijea.plugins.betterblogs/server/overview)

Anyone have additional thoughts on how we could/should proceed? We need a way for users to get notifications when comments are posted or changes are made to blogs.

[Heth Siemer]

I know it's not perfect, but there's a REALLY convoluted way using the Comala Workflow add-on.

Using the following workflow, every time a page / blog post with the given label is updated, certain people get notifications (I have a dozen workflows notifying particular people). Basically the logic says "when this is updated, send email".

Content developers need to know to add the correct label to notify said group, and it doesn't include comments as far as I know, which is why I don't love this option but I haven't found another way without forcing people to watch entire spaces and trusting that my content developers know to uncheck the "Notify Watchers" option... so it's an alright bare minimum.

{workflow:name=<name>|label=<label>}
{workflowparameter:<user/group param>|type=<user or group>}
<user alias or group alias>
{workflowparameter}
{state:Active|final=true}
{state}
{trigger: pageupdated|state=Active}
{send-email:user=<user/group param>|subject=@page@ Has Been Updated}
The page / blog @page@ has been updated. Please review.
@pageactivity@@
{send-email}
{trigger}
{workflow}

[Sandy Pflugfelder]

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply!  I'll try this out.

[Sandy Pflugfelder]

If it truly doesn't include comments, it doesn't sound like it will work for my client.  If anyone else has a workaround that would include both updates and comments, please let me know!  Thank you!