GitHub has introduced two new capabilities aimed at improving the developer experience for open source maintainers. Nick Holden, senior software engineer at GitHub, wrote in a post:

“The world’s software depends on open source projects, so it’s important that open source maintainers can spend their time productively. We’re excited to share new features aimed at increasing the quality of contributions and helping maintainers focus on what matters most to the success of their projects.”

The first feature aims to stop spam pull requests, which will allow maintainers to continue working with external contributors while cutting down time spent. Maintainers can now limit who can request changes to only those who have been granted read or higher level access.

Maintainers will be also enabled to code review limits for all repositories that are associated with their user or organization account. When a maintainer enables these limits, if an unauthorized user tries to start a code review, they’ll be given a message explaining why they can’t, but will still be able to leave a comment.

The other new improvement is that it’s now easier to triage notifications from a mobile device. When a spam issue or pull request comes in, maintainers can now close the issue or block the user from their organization directly from their phone.

In addition, GitHub has been working on other initiatives in the past year to improve the experience for open source maintainers. These include Issue Forms that allow them to create issue templates with form fields, GitHub Discussions to provide a space for open conversation, and GitHub Sponsors, which allows companies and developers to invest in the projects they use.