Disable copilot review for forks

[aqeelat]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot Code Review

Body

I have disabled automatic code reviews from my account.

However, when I fork a repo that uses copilot, my personal copilot gets triggered, which eats up my credits. And now that my credits are used, it posts a comment saying "Copilot was unable to review this pull request because the user who requested the review has reached their quota limit."
But I did not request it!

This happens to me a lot when I open PRs on pnpm, a repo for which I'm not an official maintainer.

What can I do?

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[initial-d]

This may be coming from the repository’s automatic Copilot code review configuration, not from your personal “automatic review for my own PRs” setting.

GitHub’s docs distinguish the two cases:

• Individual users can configure Copilot to automatically review PRs they create.
• Repository/organization owners can configure Copilot to automatically review PRs opened in that repository/organization.

Docs: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-on-github/set-up-copilot/configure-automatic-review

The important billing detail is in the Copilot code review docs:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/code-review

They say that if a repository is configured to automatically request a Copilot review for new PRs, AI credit consumption is attributed to the pull request author. If someone manually requests the review, the consumption is attributed to the user who requested it.

So in your case, the likely chain is:

pnpm repository has automatic Copilot review enabled
-> you open a PR from your fork
-> Copilot review is auto-requested by the target repository ruleset/config
-> usage is attributed to you as the PR author
-> if your quota is exhausted, Copilot posts the quota message

Things I would check:

1. Confirm your own setting is disabled here:

   GitHub profile picture -> Copilot settings -> Automatic Copilot code review
   

2. On one affected PR, check whether Copilot appears as a reviewer immediately after opening the PR, before you manually touch anything.

3. Ask a pnpm maintainer whether they have repository/org-level automatic Copilot review enabled, especially through a ruleset. Only repository/org maintainers can disable or narrow that setting for the target repository.

4. If this is happening even when the target repository has no automatic review setting, then I would report it as a bug with one concrete PR URL, timestamps, and screenshots showing your personal automatic review setting is disabled.

For mitigation today, I do not think a fork author can fully prevent a target repository’s automatic Copilot review rule from running. The control seems to be on the repository/organization side. But I agree the credit attribution is surprising for outside contributors, especially when the contributor did not explicitly request the review.