Can you set up an alert when added as a watcher?

[rishida]

Hi, I was wondering if it was possible to send a User an email if they are added as a Watcher on a task.

Thanks!

[Ivan Tse · Accepted solution]

To expand a bit, the deafult feature set of JIRA won't send out a message when someone is added as a watcher, but with a plugin you might be able to do something similar.

You can use the JIRA Watcher Field Plugin to add a custom field to your system.
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.burningcode.jira.issue.customfields.impl.jira-watcher-field

JIRA will send a email if the watcher custom field is updated to include a person since this triggers the "Issue Updated" event type.

You will need to keep in mind that only when adding a user through the field will send a notification. Adding a watcher throguh the regular methods will not fire a notification.

[rishida]

Great, thanks!

[rishida]

It looks like this is for the download version. Is there something for the ondemand version?

[orion elenzil]

so with atlassian-hosted jira, this is not possible ?

without this the alternative is to do something like add a comment each time you add one or more watchers. usually i write something like "+watchers". This is not hard, but in my experience it's VERY difficult to train the majority of casual jira users to do this.

[Boris Berenberg]

This is correct. There is an open feature request for this functionality at: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5494

[orion elenzil]

ah. awesome. that feature request has been open for nearly a decade, with no comment from Atlassian in the past nine years. i'll look forward to it.

[Boris Berenberg]

Orion, I dug into it a bit further, and unfortunetly I have worse news for you. In July of 2013 in this ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5493the JIRA Product Manager explicitly said that this feature will not be added in the next 12 months.

[orion elenzil]

Hi Boris - thanks for looking into this further. I think JRA-5493 is slightly different than the request here (JRA-5493 = ability to add watchers during issue creation, JRA-5494 = adding a watcher sends the watcher a notification) but I imagine the timeline is similarly distant.

it seems like another approach on Atlassian's side would be to support the "notifications" plugin as part of hosted jira.

all that said, the "@mentions" feature is news to me, and one I'll definitely use here!

[Boris Berenberg]

No, this is not currently possible.