automation to remove watchers

[Steph Bannister]

Hi,

I have a project that is uesd for document update management.

When an issue is created and roles are assigned this triggers automatic subtask creation and then the users specified in each role field are automatically assigned to the subtask.

When this happens each user mentioned in the role is added as a watcher and is getting spammed with all notifications. I would rather setup a specific notification strategy based on automation rules to notify relevant users only when their action is needed (or when they are @mentioned in a comment), and of course they need notifications when they are an assignee.

Is there a way to setup an automation rule to *remove* certain people as watchers  from a ticket after they are added? If so how does one trigger such a rule? 

OR,

Can I block users from being added as watchers to the ticket automatically in the firt place, and control this separately via automation rules? Do I need to set this in the permissions section first, make groups to define who should/shouldnt be added as watchers and when, and then add these to the notification scheme as custom notifications?

Or just block the watchers by editing watcher permissions and then setup automation-based notifications?

I'm teaching myself these steps and I didn't find this information clearly in the community posts so I'm asking here because I feel there might be several options. But, I'm not sure what is the most efficient solution.

Cheers

Steph

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Steph Bannister 

For the first option you noted, you could use the Manage Watchers action to add/remove people.  If the values are in a field, just use their account ID smart value from the field for the removal.  If mentioned in a comment, you could use a regular expression to extract their account ID and then remove them.

Kind regards,
Bill