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Comment by mlugg | Hacker News Reader

PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it certainly works out well for them that this is one of many properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from the platform.

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There's technically a way[1], but you'd have to do it every 6 months which is not great.

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/moderating-comments-a...

Yeah, that's actually what we've done on the Zig GitHub repository. However, it doesn't stop pushes to existing PRs, which isn't ideal; and, yes, it's quite hard to escape the conclusion that there being no "until I turn it back on" option is intentional.

It's completely intentional, and goes back to when GitHub was founded. GitHub was intended as a collaborative software development platform, not "look but don't touch".

I suppose you can fork a repository if you want to collaborate with others though. Reviewing pull requests and engaging with a community is a lot of work and has possible legal ramifications; in many cases it’s faster to just do things yourself. Some teams/companies deliberately refuse outside contributions for this reason.

You can close them and limit discussion to contributors I guess? Not ideal but at least they wouldn’t appear in the pull requests tab.

Alternatively you can use a bot or a GitHub Action to automatically change the description and title of the pull request to something like “[PRs are not allowed and deleted automatically]”. But yeah not a perfect solution either…

Yikes, the PRs on the Linux repo are quite terrible. At least there's a bot to auto-reply with the correct procedure.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1370

I guess you could make a bot that closes any opened PR with a message that PRs are not accepted on Github and a link to the contribution docs.

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