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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

Ah, this is actual spam as comments...

I have a different problems - Github's notification settings are far too coarse, and if you're either subscribed to lot of repos, or have a lot of actions happening on those repos the flood of email messages you get on every comment or action a person or a CI process takes is just unmanageable.

All I want is "If someone (ie, not a bot) specifically tags me on a PR where the CI is passing, send email once". This granularity unfortunately doesn't seem to be possible - that said, I would love to be wrong about this.

I ended up turning off Github's email notifications for this reason, as the signal to noise is horrible.

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Try having a generic username on there where everybody @s you as a shorthand for the real person's username and you end up getting notified. Or added to random repos and removed minutes later, but still getting the notification. :)

I recall a HN user whose GitHub username was some common word related to software development (like @deploy or @prod, but I can't recall the right name).

There was a thread about six months ago mentioned that they get @'ed constantly by mistake. They had a funny attitude towards it, though. They said they always enjoy getting to see what everyone else is working on and didn't mind the notifications.

If anyone remembers what I'm talking about, let me know because now I'm so curious about this username I can't remember.

Are you thinking of @reset?

https://discuss.systems/@adrian/110783401400871208

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36888444

Yes! That's the one.

Thanks so much. That had been gnawing at me.

I have the exact same problem, but I assumed I was too stupid to work out how to configure Github to stop this and didn't want to waste any more time trying to work it out so I just turned the emails off.

I work for a fairly large org with lots of Github repos which I occasionally contribute to and there seems to be no way to configure emails alerts in a manageable way – I must either get an email for everything or ignore everything. And ignoring everything is obviously preferable when the signal to noise is this bad.

Sounds like the same problem! I'm working at a large org, was involved in setting up lots of repos, therefore I end up getting pinged on so many of them that I'm no longer directly working on or directly interested in.

There's also not a bulk method anywhere (that I can find) in Github that can deal with unsubscribing or changing settings on many repos at the same time.

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