Notification spam when mentioned in a commit message

[droidmonkey]

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Bug

Body

I have done something that I consider to be a bug. I @ mentioned myself in a commit message that was merged into our main branch. This seemed innocent and useful since it links my account to the commit for others to view. Oh boy was I wrong!

The problem comes when forks of your repository start updating their main branch. Every time a fork updates the main branch a notification is issued to the mentioned person. There are no fine-grained controls on mention notifications, it's all or nothing. So now I have to live with periodic notification spam from the hundred forks of our repository.

The worst part about this is that I could technically infinite spam any account on github through the notification system by mentioning them in a commit merged to a very popular repository. This is terrible and not the intention of mention notifications.

The Bug: mentions in commit messages should NOT trigger a notification when a fork is updated.

Even better: users should be able to disable notifications for mentions in commits, especially from repositories they are not actively involved in.

Evidence:

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[shilch]

Hi @droidmonkey,

thanks for opening this issue! I came here because I'm encountering the same issue for at least a year now. It got way worse now such that I'm receiving hundreds of spam notifications on some days, and I'm not sure how I would even turn them off except configuring my mail server to perform a hard reject on mails containing certain keywords.

However, these notifications are not coming from proper forks but from what I suppose are bots which re-upload the repository with the Git history rewritten in their username en masse. This is what the inbox looks like I'm waking up to:

This is the original commit which mentions my username:

And here is a selection of the spam commits just from the last few hours:

• Example 1:

• Example 2:

• Example 3:

• Example 4:

[droidmonkey]

Wow that sucks! Thank you for pointing out an active "exploit" of this bug i stumbled on. I hope github fixes this soon.

[tbeu]

I hope github fixes this soon.

See #178738