Disable notifications for Draft Pull Requests

[jg185366]

Creating a new discussion for this based on an old thread:

I would like to only trigger notifications on a Pull Request when it has been marked as “Ready for Review.” Prior to that, I don’t think all watchers on a repository need to be notified that a Draft PR is open.

It's not helpful to me to get notifications when draft pull requests are created or when commits are pushed to them. The PR developer isn't finished yet so I don't want to be notified about this. It would be great if this were at least configurable.

[mike-odom]

I'm about to create 10 PRs on a Sunday and would rather my team not get bombarded with all those emails on a weekend. Draft PRs without notifications would be helpful here!

[cdemyanovich]

As someone who doesn't like draft pull requests, I would very much like to be able to opt out of notifications, especially email, for them. I'd prefer an account setting, but I'd be happy if the headers and/or content of the email indicated the draft status. At least that would allow me to use my mail client to create a filter.

[RasmusD]

Agreed. Being able to opt-out of draft pr notifications would be really great.

[SamCamhi]

At the very least DRAFT PR could be labeled as such in the email notification so they can be filtered.

[mrquincle]

It would also require the possibility of sending an email when a PR goes from draft mode into non-draft mode, and the other way around.

This would truly fix the draft mode option. There's not much of a difference with non-draft otherwise.

Having just something like a convention such as [draft] or [WIP] as a prefix for the name of a regular PR would be more useful to people because they can filter on it in their email clients.

[cdeutsch]

My teammates are obsessed with Draft PR's for some reason.

Getting a new notification every time they push a new commit is a big waste of time.

Really need an option to turn off Draft PR notifications before I just unsubscribe from everything.

[Olshansk]

+1

I often use draft PRs to do a "self-review" before I add my colleagues.

I do a check locally as well, but using the github UI forces me to have a different (i.e. external) mindset going into it.

Are there any updates on this?

[Olshansk]

Update: I spoke to a friend who is also a product manager at GitHub. This is on their radar but not a priority.

[arxeiss]

Can you ask him, if there is a way how to put higher priority for it? Like some Feature request pool or something like that?

[Bikappa]

Draft PRs are for me the best way to present some non-ready code to colleagues for early reviews.

• the diff viewer is better now with the tree view sidebar
• they can comment the code
• same-window access to checks run compared to a comparison
• some CI tasks might depend on the existence of a PR, so could the related branch deployments.

I see it as a "I'm working on it, please don't bother" mode, with the possibility intentionally propose it to colleagues for opinions or early catches from knowledgeable people passing by. For this reason I think they should/could remain quiet on the email notifications.

[jeremycarroll]

I just had a bot do a mass comment on merged PRs - and these also notified which was not helpful. So the setting should be to notify for PRs in the review phase only

[haimat]

Same here - we don't need email notifications on draft pull requests.
Any way to disable these emails?

[matthewtquinn1]

I've requested the relevant dev team with Microsoft to introduce this feature. Can people please up vote it? https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Only-post-published-Pull-Requests-to-Tea/10285656

[Olshansk]

I know features are ALWAYS 10x more complex than one imagines, but I feel like this has to be easy enough for an intern to do in < 2 months (I'm trying to be ultra liberal with timelines) and would be real impact to real users.

@github Pretty please 🥺

[nutjob4life]

I attack reviews for pull requests with zeal because I like to keep my notification box empty ("inbox zero").

Only too late I see some of the darn things were still in draft! D'oh! I approved a draft!

Thanks, GitHub 😑

[JonAbrams]

Why is it even possible review a draft PR? What's the point of having draft PRs if they're identical to normal ones?

[shaina-aq]

Yes agreed! Would appreciate if I didn't send my team members unnecessary emails when I commit to a branch I have a draft PR for because it triggers PR checks which are failed.

[oerp-odoo]

I also get notifications about failed CI via email. And when I am implementing some changes to CI, I get bombarded about it in an email. Its OK, to get it on normal PRs, but there should be an option to disable notifications per PR. I guess there is no such option? You can either turn off all notifications per repository basis or get all the spam?..

[robinovitch61]

Would love for this to be implemented -- would dramatically improve the notifications experience for people like me who like to put up drafts for self-review as well as my colleagues who I don't want to bother for review yet!

[troglobite]

I would also love for this to be configurable as I am the only one on my team that uses draft PR's early on in my workflow and my team mates receive the emails, miss the draft labels as they don't really use the feature, and start reviewing code that is not expected to work yet in the context that it is.

I in the blog post that announced the Draft PR that it discusses if you have a CODEOWNERS files it should suppress notifications on draft PR's. We do have a CODEOWNERS file set up in the repo that appears to be setup correctly, but the notification are still being sent out so I'm wondering if this is a bug or perhaps I missed an announcement of this coming back?

• https://github.blog/2019-02-14-introducing-draft-pull-requests/#:~:text=Change%20the%20status%20to%20%E2%80%9CReady%20for%20review%E2%80%9D%20near,until%20it%20is%20marked%20as%20ready%20for%20review

Also, if you have a CODEOWNERS file in your repository, a draft pull request will suppress notifications to those reviewers until it is marked as ready for review.

[arxeiss]

If I'm not mistaken, they receive notification not because they are in Code owners. But because you they checked in Watch dropdown they want to receive notifications for All activity or Pull requests.

[jlebar]

Or even put some indication in the email that it's a draft PR so I don't click on it.

[ryanleecode]

This is extremely critical especially because its easier to catch self-made errors reviewing your own PR (in draft) on GH itself, rather than in your text-editor/IDE. i should not have to worry that I'm spamming my teammates with too many emails.

[MetRonnie]

Currently there is an option to customise notifications. Would be great to add "Marked as draft" and "Marked as ready for review" to the list.

[KUGA2]

This message was added recently:

I think this is very missleading. If the author added reviewers, they are indeed notified! However, it does not add automatic reviewers (from branch policy). The message should say: "Automatic Reviewers are not added in Draft Mode" The current message is just imprecise if not wrong!