Silently Update Pages

[Josh Wright]

Is it possible to update a page without changing the version, modified date and notifying the watches? 

I am an admin and would like to make a bunch of stylistic changes to Confluence pages, such as heading styles, sections etc. but I do not want a bunch of notification going out and I don't want the activity stream to be littered with me modifying tons of pages! 

Any ideas? 

[Mirek]

I think the only way is to do it directly via database.. But to be honest I do not recommend doing this..

Confluence is build in that way to collaborate and get complete history and changes so that everyone is aware that there was a change and who did that. Not suddenly see changes without history. Imagine that you have your page and site and someone is changing it without any history entry. It is like hacking.. If you do not want to send notifications there is checkbox called "Notify watches" so you simply need to uncheck it.

[Josh Wright]

No problem, thanks for your response. I will definitely be avoiding this! :)

[Amir Dagan]

@Mirek- IMO the required approach here is to here is to have a control allowing the checkbox to be always unchecked. All my updates should be silent and logged.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not quite.  That would defeat the purpose of having a wiki, it's supposed to track all changes!

But two things:

First, for the notifications, look at the bottom of the edit page.  There's a box for "notify people on minor changes".  Setting that right will stop emails going to watchers etc.

Second, you say your changes are "stylistic" - that makes me think you might be changing settings, rather than content.  Settings changes are not content changes, so they won't hit the history or notification.  Although my guess is you do probably mean things like "I'm going to change some of the h3.s to h4s, add content to sections, and rearrange sections", which is content rather than settings.

[Josh Wright]

Fair enough...

When I say stylistic, I mean a bit more than changing H1 etc. 
It is more involved like removing some macros that are pointless, and resectioning pages. 

We have spent the last few years with people creating pages how they like and not from templates, so the aim is to now align some of the major sections to make them uniform. 

Everyone will just need to suck it up I guess!