Unable to Remove watchers

[Anil]

Hi Team,

We are facing strange issue with JIRA. We are unable to remove watchers.

We have manually removed users from Watchers field, But same users are auto adding after page refresh. Is there any workaround to fix this issue?  

Thanks

Anil

[Suvarna Gaikwad · Accepted solution]

@Anil this could happen when indexes are not in sync. Could you please try to reindex concerned project and then try to remove watchers?

[Anil]

@Suvarna Gaikwad  Thanks for your response. I tried after project reindex and it is still same.

In simple, There should be some user in watcher field. I removed watcher from field and added myself. After page refresh, I can see my name in Watcher field. This is expected behavior.

I removed my name and did page refresh, My name is still popping up.

[Sebastian Mendel]

This did not help in my case.

[Don Masten]

We've seen this from time to time.

Workaround to stop watching individual issues with this problem:

• Click "Stop watching this issue"
• Click "Start watching this issue"
• Click "Stop watching this issue" again

This also worked using Bulk Change:

• Bulk change the issues selecting "Stop watching issues"
• Bulk change the issues selecting "Start watching issues"
• Bulk change the issues selecting "Stop watching issues" again

[Shaq]

I've been having this issue with one ticket for years. It started recently with another ticket. I did what you suggested and it worked! Thanks!

[Sebastian Mendel]

I have the exact same issue.

I cannot remove the last watcher from some issues. This is not specific to a user, but always the last watcher.

I can not remove the last existing watcher, adding myself, I can remove the previous watcher, but now i cannot remove me (the last watcher) from watchers.

Not all issues are affected by this - only a percental.

Jira Server 8.20.2

Same for web UI (browser) and API (httpie CLI). No error is displayed. Web UI returns HTTP 204

[Mike McNamara]

Can also verify this scenario to a certain point. I had a user I could not remove as a watcher, so I added myself as a watcher. Then I was able to remove the other user, but then could not remove myself. I was also unable to remove any other user so in my testing, it was not just the last person added as a watcher you could not remove.

I then tried adding another watcher, and then I was able to remove myself. After that though, it reverted to no longer being able to remove any watcher.

So I next tried adding a watcher and removing 2 watchers, then doing a page refresh. No go. Only the first watcher I removed was actually removed. 

As a workaround, I am able to use an Admin account user we set up for Automations , adding them to the watchers to be able to remove 1 watcher. This will work, as long as you have a user like that you can assign, and as long as you need to remove only 1 watcher!