GroupFollow for Confluence — Support

GroupFollow is written and supported by Makhsat Alzhanov at Alzhan Group LLC. Your email reaches me, not a queue.

First response within one business day. If something is broken and blocking your team, say so in the subject line and I will treat it that way.

Email: support@alzhangroupllc.com

When reporting a problem, the space key or page URL, the group name, and roughly when it happened are usually enough for me to find it.

Troubleshooting — in the order these will actually arrive

1. "I assigned a group and nobody was notified"

Almost always the wrong tab. Confluence splits its notification panel into Direct and Watching, and watched-space and watched-page updates go to Watching. Direct carries mentions and changes to pages you own.

This cost a full day during development before anyone thought to click the other tab. Expect it to be the most common ticket by a wide margin, and answer it first every time.

Also confirm: Confluence never notifies you about your own edit. If the person testing is both the editor and the watcher, silence is correct.

2. "Someone joined the group but isn't getting notifications"

Membership is re-checked hourly. Confluence emits no event when a person joins or leaves a group — we checked the entire event catalogue — so polling is the only mechanism available to any app. Wait for the next sync.

Re-saving the assignment (remove, re-add) forces an immediate sync if they cannot wait.

3. "One specific person never gets notified"

always the opt-out working correctly. Expect it to consume the most support time of any case here.

They almost certainly unsubscribed themselves, and the app is respecting it.

If someone unwatches, the app records that as a deliberate opt-out and never re-adds them, on every future sync, permanently. That is the intended design: a sweep that re-subscribed people who opted out would fight them every hour, forever, with no way for them to win.

The administrator cannot override this, and should not be told they can. The person themselves can start watching again from the space or page's Watch button, at which point the app leaves their choice alone.

The screen tells you this. Under the assigned-groups table it shows how many people this app has subscribed and, when anyone has opted out, an N opted out marker with the explanation. So the first thing to check is that line: if it reads 1 opted out, nothing is broken.

It does not name who opted out. That is deliberate — a count answers "is this broken?", which is the real question, without reporting a personal choice to an administrator more pointedly than Confluence itself does. To identify a specific person, Confluence's own Manage watchers shows who is watching.

4. "The number in the table doesn't match who's notified"

The column is Group members — the size of the group. It is not a count of who is currently subscribed, because anyone who opted out (see 3) is still a group member.

Originally this column was labelled "People subscribed", which overstated. It was corrected before launch. If you later compute the true subscribed figure, the column can say that instead.

5. "I uninstalled the app and people are still getting notified"

Uninstalling stops all synchronisation but does not remove watches that already exist. They are ordinary Confluence watch records, indistinguishable from ones people set themselves, and they remain until removed.

To have the app withdraw what it created, remove the assignments before uninstalling. Anyone can also unwatch normally.

6. "A large group only partly synced"

Expected, and it completes on its own. Very large rosters are processed across several hourly runs rather than failing, and the screen reports partial progress ("N of M accounts processed so far") rather than claiming to be finished.

7. "Group members shows 'unknown'"

The app could not read that group's membership at that moment. It shows unknown rather than 0 deliberately — zero would claim the group subscribes nobody, which is a very different and more alarming statement. Usually transient; if it persists, the group may have been deleted or renamed.

8. "I can't see the Group watchers option"

Permissions, by design:

Both checks fail closed: if the app cannot establish that someone qualifies, the answer is no.

9. "Will this subscribe our bots and service accounts?"

No. Group members whose account type is an app or service account are filtered out. On the development test site, 10 of 12 members of confluence-users were bots from Jira, JSM, Loom and Studio.

What to ask for when something is genuinely wrong

That last question resolves case 3, which will otherwise consume the most time.