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Limiting interactions in your repository

You can temporarily enforce a period of limited activity for certain users on a public repository.

Who can use this feature?

People with admin permissions to a repository, and organization moderators, can temporarily limit interactions in that repository.

About temporary interaction limits

Enabling an interaction limit for a repository restricts certain users from commenting, opening issues, creating pull requests, reacting with emojis, editing existing comments, and editing titles of issues and pull requests.

When you enable an interaction limit, you can choose a duration for the limit: 24 hours, 3 days, 1 week, 1 month, or 6 months. After the duration of your limit passes, users can resume normal activity in your repository.

There are three types of interaction limits.

  • Limit to existing users: Limits activity for users with accounts that are less than 24 hours old who do not have prior contributions and are not collaborators.
  • Limit to prior contributors: Limits activity for users who have not previously contributed to the default branch of the repository and are not collaborators.
  • Limit to repository collaborators: Limits activity for users who do not have write access to the repository.

You can also enable activity limitations on all repositories owned by your personal account or an organization. If a user-wide or organization-wide limit is enabled, you can't limit activity for individual repositories owned by the account. For more information, see "Limiting interactions for your personal account" and "Limiting interactions in your organization."

Limiting interactions in your repository

  1. On GitHub.com, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.

    Screenshot of a repository header showing the tabs. The "Settings" tab is highlighted by a dark orange outline.

  3. In the sidebar, select Moderation options, then click Interaction limits.

  4. Under "Temporary interaction limits", to the right of the type of interaction limit you want to set, select the Enable dropdown menu, then click the duration you want for your interaction limit.

Further reading