GitHub Community
Removing notifications for @mentions in commit messages #178738
Replies: 26 comments 38 replies
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Ideally, there would be a focus on preventing and addressing the spam wholesale, rather than limiting platform features that are currently being abused. Even if it means these notifications are an issue for longer, I think it's preferable to address this correctly than slap a band-aid over it. Also, the gitcoin ghost notifications did not receive any kind of automated response, instead, users are forced to manually manipulate github API endpoints in order to clear the spam. This is an example of the spam not being addressed properly. |
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Ironically I just got commit @ mentioned for a fork of a repository I gave code reviews for about two years ago. It's the same commit sha1 and the GitHub UI shows the commit in this fork as being associated with the original PR against the primary repo. I got notifications for this commit years ago -- and at that time, I appreciated the email notification. I simply don't understand why I'm getting notifications a half an hour ago now, because someone forked the repo and pushed the same sha1 commit hash. It's a total duplicate. And it's very trivial to detect. That's something I would like to see automatically filtered out and excluded from notifications. Instead you wanted to prevent ALL notifications... but apparently they aren't even being prevented (unless you've silently rolled back the feature without telling anyone). Bizarre. |
The changelog post and the description above say that this change will be made on December 8th. |
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Oh yes, oops. I misread it as November 8. :P very well then... |
@foxt I like that idea and is definitely something we could consider in a future iteration as that would likely solve issues around spam and significantly reduce the amount of unwanted noise that comes from @mentions in commits |
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Hey @MulverineX , I wanted to share that we just shipped a major improvement to how notifications from spammy repositories and users are handled. They're now correctly hidden so users don't see inaccurate notification counts for their repositories. 🎉 This effectively fixes the long-standing “ghost notifications” issue, which has been one of the most requested improvements from our community for years so we're extremely excited to finally deliver it! You can check out our changelog for more details and feel free to leave any questions or feedback in our community discussion post. |
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How about removing email notifications for every single message in gist, even those without mentions? I have almost 20000 messages in email inbox. And it's impossible to disable email notifications. Only way is to completely unsubscribe from every gist. But it's not an option. And there is nothing in title or email address that can help to make a filtering rule. But if anybody mention me i want be notified, whatever it's gist or commit messages or anywhere else. Just, if think that way, we can remove any notifications whatsoever. Spam can be everywhere. It's just spam itself that has to be addressed. |
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@regs01 thanks for this feedback! We're planning to make more progress on improving notification handling overall and this is just one step along the way. Regarding gists, are there ever cases where you want to receive a notification, whether someone mentions you or not? |
On Gist at least a way to disable email notifications, unless mentioned. But still see subscription in |
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Could this be a dedicated setting? It is sometimes quite nice to see being mentioned in a commit, e.g. when changes are based on what you suggested. Though it is only nice to have; it is understandable if the needed effort or the disadvantages do not justify this. |
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@Marcono1234 Thanks for the feedback! Would love to get some more details - in what cases has being mentioning in a commit been helpful for you? Do you think being mentioned in the commit is a better experience than being mentioned in a PR or Issue? Or being sent the commit ID itself? Also curious how often you get @mentioned in commits. Let me know! It'd be super helpful to hear more about your experience/what the ideal behavior would be for you. |
Helpful in the sense that you notice your previous comment or suggestion was noticed, and as appreciation. It is always nice to see when a comment or suggestion you made is helpful.
For the cases I can think of, being mentioned in a commit was fine since it was mostly to be notified, not to start a new discussion.
Not that often, but there were a few cases in recent months:
Also, for none of these I am a "member" of the project. So if you limit commit mentions, might be good to still include (external) contributors and not just direct project members. Or maybe even detect if a user has interacted with the repository in some way without being considered a "contributor" yet, but maybe detecting that is difficult and would lead to too many false positives. So far my personal experience with notifications from mentions in commits have been positive. I have rather experienced other forms of spam so far (but only now and then):
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+1 … The cases where I got mentioned on a commit was actually almost always when the committer did not properly cherry pick or correctly use the |
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I would think that this should be an option available in settings (to enable if you get pinged for a mention) |
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If it were optional, you might be impelled to enable commit message mention notifications by collaborator expectation. Already, I think most of us assume most users have mention notifications turned on. The lack of any way to receive a type of notification means you'll know that your action is guaranteed never to send a notification and, if it's important, that you might want to consider notifying them some other way. |
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I want to second what @DNin01 explained above - in the case that the user you're @mentioning has their notifications toggled off, then you won't have certainty that they were notified in your commit message. Would love to get more details on how notifications from @mentioning in commits has been valuable to you. Are there certain cases where it's been particularly helpful? How frequently do you do this/receive these notifications? Would you find value in only sending notifications to users who are members of the repo? Or would allowing users to search through commit messages so they find anything they've been @mentioned in be helpful? |
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Why not just let users decide if they want to see those notifications or not? Would be easy enough to add an opt-out somewhere, for those who feel to spammed by these notifications... |
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yes! |
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@teutoburg At this stage, make things configurable would require a considerable amount of work and have potential impacts on performance. We're currently shipping changes in increments to improve the overall notification experience, so this was a first step in that direction. Regardless of performance implications, there are also unavoidable edge cases to consider. For example, if the user being mentioned has notifications turned off, it’s impossible to guarantee they’ll be notified as intended. This would end up requiring manual outreach either way. Since it's unclear whether someone will actually see tor act on the mention, most people end up using other methods to get in touch regardless. As an alternative, would receiving @mention notifications only from users who are members of the repo be valuable to you? Or would allowing users to search through commit messages so they find anything they've been @mentioned in be helpful? |
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How about clearing notifications from spam/deleted repositories? Someone spam tagged me in |
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OT - https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174283#discussioncomment-14505163 worked for me. |
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Thanks @tbeu that worked for me too |
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@shoenig we're currently working on a fix for this! We're shipping these changes incrementally with the end goal of improving notifications and handling spam within notifications overall. I'll share an update with the fix is released. |
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แก้ไขข้อบกพร่องสําหรับ @widebang ตัวใหม่ผม ### มีเปลี่ยนแปลง 🚀 > ใน 8 ธันวาคม ### ขอโทษที่ทำให้เดือดร้อนหากคุณมีคําถามหรือข้อเสนอแนะใดๆ โปรดแสดงความคิดเห็นในโพสต์นี้ เราอยากฟังความคิดเห็นของคุณ ✨ |
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Please do not make this change! 😳 Having a opt-in setting for this would be suitable, but please do not remove these notifications completely! |
This is the wrong solution to the problem. |
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@andybak do you frequently get notifications with @mentions that have been really valuable to you? If so, can you provide more context on when these notifications have helped you and how often you receive them? |
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I really appreciate getting notifications when someone implements a fix based on my suggestions. As someone who has never received spam through commit mentions, this change is purely negative. Please make it a setting or keep the current behaviour. |
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Please just make this a toggle! |
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The biggest problem with removing this feature is that most people won't even know it was removed. I think it's quite reasonable to assume the vast majority of GitHub users do not read every post on the GitHub changelog - and this change (the absence of notifications) will be completely invisible to them (unlike, say, a change in the UI that users would see as they use the product). They'd just carry on thinking no one has mentioned them in any commit messages, even if that's not true. I agree with the other posters who have stated that this should be a setting for users to decide for themselves. This would fall right in line on the https://github.com/settings/notifications page, which already offers various ways for users to configure their personal notification preferences (on the other hand, taking a blanket "no one will be able to get these notifications anymore" stance for every user, as planned, is totally unaligned with the precedent of the highly configurable https://github.com/settings/notifications page). Then, if someone is dealing with a lot of @mention spam in commit messages, they could decide to opt out of them, while other users who value the feature, and get zero or insignificant spam, can still rely on it. Unfortunately, I fear this decision won't be changed for the same reason I already stated: most people don't read the changelog and thus won't even know this is being removed, which means the ones who care about this feature won't even know they should be adding their vote in this discussion. So even if GitHub is open to changing this decision if they get a lot of pushback in this thread, it's practically guaranteed they won't receive a lot of pushback here, due to folks having to even know about it in the first place. |
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@ebndev @helen @moraesc Any thoughts on the above, including how this goes against the spirit of personal configurability/flexibility of the https://github.com/settings/notifications page? And how the absence of notifications isn't something those expecting such notifications would realize they are missing? |
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Hey @rmacklin, thanks for sharing your thoughts! It’s really helpful to hear your perspective. You’re right that many users may not notice this change, especially since it isn’t reflected in the UI. We recognize the challenge in raising awareness, but we’ve still managed to gather a lot of valuable feedback through this discussion thread, Twitter conversations, and user interviews. We did consider making @mention notifications in commit messages configurable. However, notification delivery won't always reliable if we do so. For example, if a user has notifications turned off, then the person mentioning them has no way of knowing if their message was seen, which means they'd have to revert to manual outreach anyway. Making this configurable would also require considerable engineering work and could impact performance. While we're making incremental changes and this release is just one step, we'd need to ensure there's a clear benefit in making this a setting to ensure any added complexity truly provides value to users. We’re actively exploring alternative ways to add value for users who relied on this feature. Some ideas include allowing @mention notifications only from repo members, or enabling users to search commit messages for mentions. Would options like these be useful to you? Would love to hear your thoughts or any other suggestions. |
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I welcome this change. I don’t understand how this was ever considered a good idea in the first place. Notifications via pull requests and reviews make perfect sense, but doing so through commit messages is simply an abuse of Git. If this feature becomes optional, please make sure it’s disabled by default. Thanks. |
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เปลี่ยนแปลงให้ดีขึ้น มันก็ควรค่าต่อความเสี่ยงที่อาจได้รับถ้ามันเป็นเรื่องดีๆ ก็กลับจะกลับมาเปลี่ยนแปลงมันอีก ขอบคุณที่รับฟังและแสดงงความห่วงใยคับ |
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I kind of have mixed feelings on this one. Sometimes it's good to receive notifications for commit mentions. Like a change/issue you reported privately got address and attributed to you, you can then continue with some tasks which were pending due to it. Please make this a toggle |
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@thunder-coding do you find these notifications more useful than being @mentioned in a PR or Issue? If this was configurable, there's a chance that the user being mentioned has their notifications turned off, in which case it'd be impossible to guarantee they'll be notified as intended, so manual outreached would be required. We've thought about making commit messages searchable so users can still find commits where they're mentioned, or only allowing @mention notifications from repo members. Would either of these solutions be valuable for you? |
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Yeah, this should 100% be a toggle since there's multiple users here who're using this feature. |
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if there's a spam issue, the correct way to solve that is a user blacklist for notifs and a toggle, not a removal. |
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If the goal is to rule out spam, excessive mentioning could be auto-detected (if a single commit description contains several mentions) so it doesn't send notifications, but I also find it annoying when a branch is updated with commits such as those from upstream that contain a mention and I am notified again for the same commit, or something like that? I don't have a particular problem with commits that mention a few of the repository's own collaborators. |
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After this change, it might be helpful to have a way to tell whether or not your mention will send a notification—like a tooltip or alert that says either of the following:
This would even be helpful in general and to indicate if a user has all types of mention notifications turned off. Another solution would be a way to specifically ping another user for attention (either without posting a comment or with a special type of mention) or even to directly message a collaborator through GitHub. |
Potentially breaking people's workflow is a "step along the way"?
Hopefully the feedback has led to the conclusion "oh shit. this was a mistake. let's roll it back" Seriously - this is a breaking change. Your casual tone is inappropriate. |
The response was perfectly respectful, curious, and soliciting feedback and information. Yes, a notice period announcement is a first step. There's a reason there's a notice period, because there are many silent and unknown usages of various features as we have very creative and clever users on GitHub. We are happy to hear about what could break for you, but attacking an individual is not adding to the conversation. |
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I think this change solves the wrong problem. Most teams don’t need commit-mention notifications removed — they need control. A toggle would solve everything:
This doesn’t need to be complicated — even a simple binary preference (“Notify me for commit mentions: Yes/No”) would prevent both spam and frustration. |
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As someone who has complained about this for over a decade at this point, I am honestly shocked and surprised that you are finally fixing it! Thank you. It will be nice to no longer get shouted at for pkgsrc commit logs that have absolutely nothing to do with GitHub. Now we just need the same for |
Definitely not. Its highly useful and important function |
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Was me. Ths trashAgent...and now all have. |
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I'm glad this issue has been resolved. Thanks. And I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, I want to know whether using @mentions in the title of a PR would send notifications to the specified GitHub account? |
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Hey @XiShanYongYe-Chang, @mentions in the title of a PR will not send notifications to the mentioned GitHub account. |
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@moraesc, thanks for your reply. |
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This seems like a step backwards. I often mention collaborators in commits as an FYI when something doesn’t warrant a full PR or is based on changes they suggested. If you want to reduce spam maybe restrict who can trigger these notifications, eg to collaborators and team members, don’t remove a useful feature altogether. |
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Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but has anyone heard of whisperpair? I heard someone confess over my Bluetooth headphones that they live near me and they've been doing this to me for at least two years that I'm aware of. |
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Yhe guythat they are clone, is me. THis is a nuke. YHeu already aring asking to hlobal crisis from this do dam dagent.. |
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I tried to remove, delete to avoid.but this agent alreasdyare i alll. WE are FU. Because juste sento our machines t trash. |
and others
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To reduce spam and help you focus on what matters most, we're removing notifications generated from mentions in commit messages. Previously, mentioning a user or team in a commit message (e.g., fixes bug for @username) triggered a notification, just like in issues or pull requests.
What’s changing 🚀
On December 8th, Users and teams will no longer receive notifications when mentioned in a commit message. Mentions in issues, pull requests, and discussions will continue to trigger notifications.
How to give feedback 🗒️
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to drop a comment in this post. We'd love to hear your thoughts ✨
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