A colleague of mine @-mentioned me in a commit message a few weeks ago. Now when other people do something with their forks of our repo, I get email notifications mentioning that commit. I don’t know what they are doing that would cause a notification, but I think it might be as simple as pushes back to github in their fork. These notifications are not useful.
I think I will raise this as a problem, but wonder if someone else has a clearer understanding of what’s happening.
Hi @dhalbert
What you’re mentioning there is possible and absolutely annoying. I’m happy to add your query here to the internal issue tracking this and related issues, but if you’d prefer to open a ticket you can do that too!
How many notifications would you say you’ve received from this one mention?
I have received this notification 11 times. They started March 22. My colleagues have gotten similar notifications recently same thing with @-mentions in commit messages, so it’s not just me. I can open a ticket.
@canuckjacq / @dhalbert —
We’re seeing the same thing on our project, where we really started noticing it March 31, but it could’ve been happening prior to that and it just took awhile for us to register what was going on. I’ve received dozens of notifications due to the same couple of PRs that I was @-tagged on as a reviewer being merged into dozens of distinct colleagues’ and GSoC applicants’ forks. Let us know if we can provide additional information to help improve this situation.
Thanks,
-Brad
Here’s a related cry for help posted by one of my colleagues:
-Brad
I work on a large project. 20+ notifications today alone… over the last week about 70-80… amazingly annoying.
I’ve opened a ticket and will report back if there is progress toward a fix.
Thanks for all your reports - I’ve added them to the internal tracking issue.
If you’re opening a ticket (or already have done) please specify the commit generating the notifications - this will help speed up resolutions!
Since this is the busiest thread, I’m going to merge the others here.
I was added as a co-author to another user’s commit, by a mention. Now I’m spammed daily with notifications from random users’ forks of the repository, for that commit. I’m assuming the notification is created when a user forks the project. How do I disable this without disabling mention notifications entirely?
From what I can tell, the recent GitHub notifications changes introduced a change such that a mention in a PR merge message will generate notifications for every fork that pulls that change into their main branch, e.g. the main branch merges a PR with the merge message:
Fix issue #1484, reviewed by @user
Now every time a downstream fork updates their copy of main with the upstream changes, the @user mentioned in the merge message gets a notification.
Is there any way to disable these types of notifications without completely disabling notifications for mentions?
@canuckjacq — If we haven’t opened personal tickets, is there any benefit to listing such commits here? Or would you like each individual running into this to open a separate ticket? (I’d been assuming that multiple tickets on the same issue would just become an annoyance rather than a benefit).
Thanks,
-Brad
As always in the forum, if it’s public, and you’re happy to link it - please do! It means at least we can all have a look, and also - this topic is linked in an internal issue, so if someone has picked it up, they’ll see any links and discussion/wisdom we have cooked up over here 
@canuckjacq — The following table shows the primary PRs and their merge commits that have been generating excessive notifications for me during the past week due to my being @-mentioned in the merge message. This seems to be happening whenever anyone pulls the change into their local copy of our repo:
| PR | commit SHA (*) |
|---|---|
| Upgrade pycparser (used by c2chapel) to 2.20 by ronawho · Pull Request #17519 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub / | 77853cadc52593e0dab448e7a0ba87d4c493ff03 |
| Support for C unions in c2chapel by leekillough · Pull Request #17499 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub | 2790dd16e65474f2d9eba9fa6f7d38c617c833 |
Being @-mentioned in PR merge messages is a common practice in our project, yet the number of these notifications this past week has been through the roof, which is what made us suspicious that something might have changed on GitHub’s side. Historically, I believe we’ve only received notifications at the time that the original PR was merged. The notifications also aren’t really interesting or useful since they just seem to indicate “someone else has grabbed a copy of this commit you happened to be mentioned in.”
Hope this is useful,
-Brad
* = I originally tried to put links here as well, but don’t have the GitHub Discourse cred to do so.
This one is hammering me:
This commit has been slamming me all week docs: layout is singular · bazelbuild/bazel@4de09df · GitHub
I received a reply to my personal ticket. I’ll ask if they would also reply here.
Indeed as you correctly stated, it does appear that any time that commit is pushed to a new branch, we are sending you a notification for the @mention in that commit message. While the message itself is nice I can absolutely understand how that’s going to get annoying.
We don’t currently have a way to specifically filter out or disable these notifications. They fall under “Participating” in your notification settings which I’m afraid also includes @mentions in comments, threads you’ve commented in or authored, and other threads that you’re already participating in.
I’ve passed this on to our notifications team so we can discuss this in the context of adding more fine-grained settings to notifications. This isn’t something I have an ETA on right now, nor can I promise if it will make an appearance, but I will ensure this is seen by our team and in good hands.
@danh’s support ticket reply is frustrating, because it’s hard to tell if they understand that these commits are persisting past the point that a PR is merged. I’m getting them constantly for a PR that was merged a week ago, and could presumably get them forever if things are not changed. I cannot think of a case where these post-merge notifications would be useful to anyone - this seems like a bug, not a case for more notification resolution or some other new feature.
[echoing @hierophect 's response, typed simultaneously]
Thanks for passing that response along, @dhalbert. It’s not completely surprising to me that GitHub would behave this way given its notification settings and how it defines things, which is what this response seems to be saying. But what seems surprising is that I think we’re all noticing that something has changed recently to cause notifications to be sent in such cases now where they hadn’t been before, and the response doesn’t seem to acknowledge that in any way. So the response implies that they thing you’re asking for a new feature request rather than complaining about a change in behavior.
(I’m almost imagining that someone “fixed a bug” in the past few weeks upon noticing that notifications weren’t being sent for these cases; but which had the unintended consequence of filling up inboxes with pointless notifications. That is, maybe it wasn’t a bug that was fixed, but a poorly documented “feature”).
-Brad
Yes, I have replied in my ticket that it’s an (unwanted) recent change.