Keep up with Confluence Comments

Confluence is intended as a collaboration platform, and one way it enables this is via comments. People can go onto a page, and leave questions, ideas or corrections at any time. This is a great feature since it allows anyone (or at least anyone with appropriate permissions) the ability to pitch in. (personally I do this a lot when I notice something seems to be out of date, misspelled or otherwise needing help).

Unfortunately I notice that many groups don’t follow up on comments - their pages end up riddled with yellow highlighting (indicating there’s a comment) that just sit there. At best this will result in a minor error (like spelling) not being corrected - at worst it can result in frustration and damage relationships. Fortunately, there are a few ways to keep track of comments.

Turn on (and monitor) notifications

If you’re @ mentioned in a comment, Confluence will helpfully send a notification to your email. This is the default behavior, but can easily get lost or ignored. I always recommend that groups keep their notifications on, and don’t filter them out of email, just to ensure they see them. I’ve also rarely run into someone who gets too many comment notifications, so realistically keeping them on won’t drown you in emails.

Generally I don’t find I get too many notifications (likely because many people aren’t commenting!), so when I do get one or two I take it as a good sign as people are actually engaging with my content.

You can control your notifications by clicking on your account name (in the top right, then on “Personal settings”.

Next click on “Email”, then review the options on the right.

Actively monitor your pages

If you’re a page owner you should also be actively reviewing your pages for comments (and other things like updates). Depending on the page you may do this more or less frequently, but making time to review the pages you own (and are ideally updating regularly) will help catch new comments.

Fortunately Confluence makes it easy to see those comments - just click on the comment icon at the top - and you’ll see them all pop out on the page. Personally I find myself reviewing my most popular / visible pages regularly to ensure I catch any comments, while less-used pages I check less frequently.

Search

You can search for comments in Confluence - however, without add-ons this can be a bit clunky as you’ll have to search for keywords in the comments to find them. Search also doesn’t currently support the ability to find unresolved comments, so you should rely on the top two methods to really catch them all.