Group Watch for Confluence — documentation

Assign a group as a watcher of a Confluence space or page. Everyone in the group is subscribed, and membership is re-checked every hour, so people who join the group later are subscribed automatically.

Read this first: where the notifications appear

Confluence files these under the "Watching" tab of the notification bell, not "Direct".

This one sentence prevents most support tickets about this app. Confluence separates notifications about you (someone mentioned you, someone assigned you a task — the Direct tab) from notifications about things you watch (the Watching tab). A group watch is a watch, so it lands in Watching.

If a colleague says "the app isn't working, I got nothing", ask which tab they looked at before anything else.

Email delivery follows each person's own Confluence notification settings, which this app does not and cannot change.

Assigning a group to a space

Everyone in the group is notified about changes anywhere in the space.

1. Go to the space → Space settings → Integrations → Group watchers.
2. Find the group under Add a group. Use the filter box for long lists.
3. Click Add.

Subscription happens immediately — you do not wait for the hourly sync. The result line tells you how many people it actually subscribed.

Who can do this: space administrators only.

Assigning a group to a single page

Everyone in the group is notified when that one page changes.

1. Open the page → ••• (top right) → Apps → Group watchers.
2. Find the group, click Add.

Who can do this: anyone who can edit the page.

That is a deliberately lower bar than the space surface. Assigning a group to a page is closer to "@mention the team on this page" than to an administrative act, and requiring an admin for it would make the feature useless for the people who need it. Confluence's own answer decides — if it would let you edit the page, you may assign a group to it.

If a group already watches the whole space, you do not need to add it to a page in that space as well. It is not harmful, just redundant.

Reading the table

Beneath the table:

"N subscribed by this app" — how many people this app actually subscribed.

"N already watching before it was assigned" — people who had already chosen to watch on their own. The app leaves those alone and will never remove them, because it did not create them. This is why "Group members" and "subscribed by this app" often disagree, and that disagreement is correct rather than a fault.

"N opted out" — see below.

When someone unsubscribes

Anyone can stop watching, using Confluence's own Watch button. They do not need permission, and they do not need to tell anybody.

That choice is permanent. This app records it and will not re-subscribe them on any future sync, however many times membership is re-checked. An app that re-added people every hour would be a tool for overriding a colleague's stated preference, and it would be indistinguishable from spam.

They can start receiving notifications again themselves with the Watch button. Nobody else can do it for them — not an administrator, not this app.

The admin screen shows an "N opted out" count so the discrepancy is explained rather than mysterious. It shows a count, not names: the count answers the real question — "is this broken?" — without reporting a personal decision to an administrator more pointedly than Confluence itself does. Confluence's own Manage watchers still lists individuals for anyone who needs that.

How membership stays in sync

Confluence emits no event when someone joins or leaves a group. This app therefore re-checks every assigned group once an hour.

The practical consequence, stated plainly: someone who joins a group today may wait up to an hour before they start receiving notifications. Assigning a group syncs immediately, but later membership changes are picked up on the next hourly pass.

When someone leaves an assigned group, the app removes the watch it created for them — and only that. A watch someone set for themselves is never removed.

To check without waiting, press "Sync now" on the settings screen. It re-checks every assigned group immediately and tells you what changed — or says "No change needed", which is the answer you usually want. The counts beside it refresh at the same time.

Large groups are processed in chunks across several passes rather than all at once, so a big roster takes longer to finish but never stalls the others.

Removing an assignment

Click Remove on the row.

This unsubscribes the people this app subscribed, and nobody else. Anyone who was already watching before the group was assigned keeps watching, and anyone who chose to watch independently is untouched.

Licensing

Above the free tier, an unlicensed site cannot add new group assignments.

Everything else keeps working: existing assignments stay in sync, membership changes are still picked up, and nobody is unsubscribed because of a licence. You can also still remove assignments.

Privacy

This app runs entirely on Atlassian Forge, inside your own Atlassian environment. It operates no servers, makes no outbound network requests beyond Atlassian's own APIs, and sends nothing to any third party.

It stores which groups are assigned to which spaces and pages, the Atlassian account IDs of people it has subscribed, and who made each assignment. It does not store names or page content.

Full policy: privacy policy.

Troubleshooting

"Nobody received anything." Check the Watching tab of the notification bell, not Direct. This is the cause the overwhelming majority of the time.

"I made a change and got no notification myself." Confluence does not notify you about your own edits. Test with a second account.

"The numbers do not match." "Group members" counts the group. "Subscribed by this app" counts what the app did. They differ when people already watched independently, or when someone has opted out. Both figures are shown for exactly this reason.

"Someone new joined the group and got nothing." Membership is re-checked hourly. Press Sync now rather than waiting.

"I see two Group watchers entries in space settings." Only relevant on a site with both a development and production installation of the app. They are separate installations with separate storage.

Support

Response targets and severity definitions: SLA.