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User Guide: Managing GitHub Notifications

Notifications play a crucial role in keeping us updated with the activities related to our projects on GitHub. However, it can sometimes become overwhelming due to the sheer volume. Here’s a guide to help you manage your GitHub notifications efficiently and reduce unnecessary noise.

Step 1: Understanding the Source of Notifications

GitHub sends notifications based on your interactions and subscriptions on the platform. By default, you’re subscribed to conversations when:

  • You’ve not disabled automatic watching for repositories or teams you’ve joined.

  • You’re assigned to an issue or pull request.

  • You’ve opened a pull request or issue.

  • You’ve commented on a thread.

  • You’ve manually subscribed to a thread by clicking Watch or Subscribe.

  • Your username or team you’re a member of is @mentioned.

  • You’ve changed the state of a thread, such as closing an issue or merging a pull request.

Step 2: Unsubscribe from Unwanted Notifications

If you want to unsubscribe from certain conversations, you can:

  1. Visit the Conversation: Navigate to the specific issue, pull request, or gist that you’re receiving notifications from.

  2. Unsubscribe: Look for the ‘Unsubscribe’ button on the right side of the conversation page and click it. This will prevent further notifications from this particular thread.

Step 3: Managing Repository Subscriptions

To unsubscribe from a repository:

  1. Visit the Repository: Navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Change Watch Status: On the top right, you’ll see a ‘Watch’ button. Click it and select ‘Unwatch’. This prevents you from receiving notifications from this repository.

Step 4: Managing Default Subscriptions

You can also control your default subscription settings:

  1. Visit Your Settings: Click your profile picture in the top right corner, then select ‘Settings’.

  2. Navigate to Notifications: In the left sidebar, select ‘Notifications’.

  3. Configure Your Settings: Here, you can control the default watching behavior, decide how you’d like to receive notifications, and customize your email preferences.

Remember, you can also customize your notifications inbox to focus on the notifications you care most about, using filters, custom work-flows, and saving important notifications.

It’s important to manage your GitHub notifications to focus on what matters most and avoid being overwhelmed. Take some time to adjust these settings according to your needs.

For more details, you can always refer to the official GitHub documentation on Managing your subscriptions and Configuring notifications.

If you’re still receiving unwanted notifications, consider reviewing your email headers, which show the intended recipient. If you need any further assistance or have feedback or feature requests for notifications, consider using our #github-community discussion in slack.

These links will show your personal GitHub notification settings:

This page was last reviewed on 29 August 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 29 November 2024 by the page owner #operations-engineering-alerts .
This page was set to be reviewed before 29 November 2024 by the page owner #operations-engineering-alerts. This might mean the content is out of date.