GitHub Lets Triage-Role Users Archive Pull Requests and Counts Draft Pull Requests Toward Per-User Pull Request Limits

Overview

GitHub made two changes on October 8 aimed at maintainers who deal with unwanted pull requests. According to the GitHub Changelog, users with the triage role or higher can now archive and unarchive pull requests. A second changelog entry says repositories can now configure pull request limits to also include draft pull requests.

What Changed

Archiving opens up to triagers

Previously, according to the changelog, archiving “was limited to repository administrators, requiring trusted triagers to hand routine moderation work to someone with higher permissions.” GitHub describes archiving as “often used for spam, duplicate, or abandoned pull requests.”

The same entry lists how archiving now behaves:

• Users with the triage, write, maintain, or admin role can archive and unarchive pull requests.
• Archiving automatically closes the pull request and makes its conversation read-only.
• New comments, reactions, and automated comments are blocked while a pull request is archived.
• Archived pull requests are hidden from public view and remain visible to repository administrators.
• Unarchiving restores the ability to comment and react, but does not reopen the pull request.

GitHub also changed how archived pull requests become read-only. Previously, the changelog says, “archiving would lock the pull request, but admins were still able to leave comments.” Now GitHub is “preventing any new activity on the pull request once it’s been archived.” The company says this keeps archived pull requests read-only without giving triage users the ability to change a conversation’s locked state, which requires write access.

Drafts count toward the limit

Pull request limits let maintainers cap how many pull requests a person can have open. GitHub’s documentation on interaction limits says that in a public repository, “you can set a maximum number of pull requests that a user without write access can have open at the same time,” and that the limit does not apply to users with write access or higher.

According to the draft pull request changelog entry, “draft pull requests didn’t count toward a user’s limit,” which meant “someone could open any number of drafts, even when you’d set a limit for other pull requests.” GitHub says counting drafts “helps you curb that loophole and reduce the clutter, notifications, and CI runs that can come with repository spam.” The entry opens by saying maintainers “are seeing more low-quality contributions in their repositories and need better ways to manage them.”

What We Don’t Know

• The changelog entry says users can “now configure” limits to include drafts. It does not say whether the setting is off by default or whether existing limits change automatically.
• The interaction-limits documentation page, when fetched for this article on October 9, still stated that “Draft pull requests do not count toward a user’s limit.” That text conflicts with the new changelog entry, which suggests the page had not yet been updated.
• GitHub does not say in either entry how many repositories or maintainers asked for these changes, or whether it has measured an effect on spam.

Context

Both changes sit in a run of pull request updates from GitHub this month. The company also made stacked pull requests generally available, which The Machine Herald covered earlier. GitHub asks for feedback on both in its Community discussions.