Putting a stop to noise in pull request reviews

Open source maintainers often deal with a persistent annoyance: contributors who approve or request changes on pull requests without any real stake in the repository. To help curb this, GitHub has introduced code review limits, which give maintainers the power to restrict who can perform those two specific review actions.

At the repository level, you can limit approvals and change requests to only users who have been explicitly granted read access or higher. To turn this on:

  1. Navigate to the repository’s Settings page and select Moderation settings from the left menu.
  2. Click Code review limits, then select the Limit to users explicitly granted read or higher access checkbox.

Screenshot of "Code review limits" section of settings page

Maintainers can also apply this setting across every repository tied to their user or organization account. From the account-level settings page, the process is similar:

  1. Under Moderation settings, click Code review limits.
  2. Click the Limit reviews on all repositories button.

Screenshot of button to enable repository-level code review limits

Once enabled, any user without explicit access who attempts to start a review will find that the approve and request changes options are disabled, accompanied by a tooltip explaining why. They can still submit a regular comment. The feature was born from a hackathon project by GitHub’s Communities team, which maintains several of the company’s own open source projects; the group built the first working version in less than three days.

Swift moderation from the mobile app

Handling an influx of spammy issues or pull requests while on the go is now less painful. In the GitHub mobile app, when a problematic item appears in your notifications, you can take immediate action by closing the issue or pull request and blocking the offending user from your organization—all without switching to a desktop browser.

Image of phone displaying GitHub Mobile's block options

Other recent quality-of-life improvements

Beyond these new controls, GitHub has been rolling out several other features this year aimed at improving the maintainer workflow:

  • Issue Forms: A beta feature that lets you create issue templates with structured form fields, including required inputs, to ensure submissions come with the necessary context.
  • GitHub Discussions: Now out of beta, this feature offers communities a dedicated space for conversation and peer support, which can help lower the volume of incoming issues.
  • GitHub Sponsors: With the recent addition of custom amounts and one-time payments, sponsors now have more flexible ways to provide financial support to maintainers.