Subscribe to releases but not pre-releases

[martpie]

edit: related to isaacs/github#1978

Some people use the "watch releases" feature to keep updated of projects, new features, etc.

Unfortunately, some projects use pre-releases a lot, and can sometimes publish some multiple times per day, making the amount of noise in the notifications consequent.

It would be nice to have an option to subscribe to releases, but ignore pre-releases.

Example of annoying notifications:

[AndreCunha1]

Potential duplicates (should be added to the upvote count 😄):

• Possibility to ignore pre-releases in notifications isaacs/github#1978 (not really a duplicate, more like the initial one)
• Ability to get notifications for Releases but not Pre-Releases #10776
• The notifications and RSS/Atom feeds for releases should (optionally?) exclude pre-releases #17052
• Ignore prerelease notifications #29192

[mbentley]

I am pretty sure I am not missing notifications but one thing I have found a pattern on is that there are a few projects that I am following where they create a pre-release and then will change that pre-release to an actual release. The problem there in my case where I am relying on email is that there is no second notification that a release has been promoted to a release. That would be a use case that I assume would need to be addressed if this were to be implemented - making sure to actually trigger a notification for that action.

Even in cases where it looks like a 2nd notification is possibly sent in my email, it still has the same "pre-release" message in the subject but even that doesn't seem to be consistent as the last release is 3.2.2 which was promoted at some point from pre-release to release but I only have one email notification:

[deron-dev]

Perhaps in the custom subscription options, there could be an option to exclude pre-releases.

Every existing subscription to releases could be converted to a releases and pre-releases subscription, so existing behavior is not changed.

[ReenigneArcher]

So simple, c'mon GitHub!

[graphixillusion]

Absolutely needed!

[moracha]

Is there really no possible way on Github to be notified of a new release on a repo without also getting notified of every pre-release? And this seemingly common feature request has been pending for over 3 years? Just unwatched a favorite repo of mine because I can't handle multiple pre-release notifications a day.

[3Domse3]

Why is this still an issue in late 2024 :(

[ReenigneArcher]

[PHLAK]

This has been bugging me a lot. Some of the projects I'd like to receive release notifications for release nightly builds tagged as pre-release so I have to choose between receiving daily release emails (noisy) or no release emails (useless). Please GitHub, this should have been resolved three years ago, shortly after this issue was opened.

[DrMcCoy]

It can get even worse, one project I'm following, a plugin for Jellyfin, is automatically doing multiple prereleases (on for each supported Jellyfin version) per commit. I get a dozen or more emails about it per day just because I want to keep up with main releases of that plugin...

[tastyratz]

This is driving me nuts because I want to subscribe to proper releases on a repository and I'm getting blasted by pre-releases.

I really don't want 4 canary builds a day I just want to know when stable changes and instead I'm going to have to unfollow the whole repo and put it on my calendar to check periodically instead.

That's terrible.

[malaxes]

Another for filtering out pre-releases.

[stunami3]

Come on GitHub! We need this.

[m-bartlett]

Amplifying this

[lonix1]

We're subscribed to various AWS repos, as AWS is fundamental to our work so we must remain abreast of developments.

Recently, over a 48-hour period we received over two dozen notifications, all pre-releases.

Please GitHub devs, this issue it not one of UI cosmetics... it's actually important for your users' project planning!

[C0rn3j]

@matthewisabel hopefully the ping isn't too intrusive, thought a PM might want to be aware of this.

Projects both big and small use pre-releases on-commit (here's an example project doing so), making the email notifications useless for such projects without extra filtering in the email client.

It does not look too difficult to implement, at least on a surface level without seeing the internals, and the extra checkbox would help a lot of people, judging from the hundreds of upvotes on this issue.

The UI mockup here looks quite nice - https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/4993#discussioncomment-8857291

Would it be possible for someone from GitHub to take a stab at implementing this?

[ReenigneArcher]

Not to mention, not having this is hurting projects because some users will intentionally un-star/un-follow a repo because they don't want to be annoyed by the pre-release emails/notifications.

• https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/4993#discussioncomment-11171335
• https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/4993#discussioncomment-10675607

We have ~25k stars, and I can't help but think it would be quite a bit higher if this were fixed.

[dejaime]

Yes, definitely need this.
Pre-releases being considered releases by default is a bug at the very least.
Having a way to opt-in would be ideal.

[rdself]

Definitely need this!

[peterge-misoft]

I achive a similar result (not shoeing pre-release mails) in thunderbird using this rule:

[Killator]

UP ! That would be really useful...

[TBM13]

Upvote, this is really needed

[Vijartal]

Definitely need this.

[simenflatby]

✚

[iamspido]

Unbelievable that this still hasn't been implemented after 4 years. Especially since the effort required doesn't seem to be very high. I really need this urgently. The spam in emails is incredibly high...

[iamspido]

I'm currently writing a self-hostable app for this problem. I'll keep you updated. I think the release will be within the next few days or 1-2 weeks.

[iamspido]

Hi, I've finished the self-hostable app I mentioned: https://github.com/iamspido/github-release-monitor
It filters out pre-releases and sends notifications only for actual releases. Available now if anyone wants to try it.

[drandarov-io]

2. There is a third party solution already, you can set up any Atom reader and set up a filter for GitHub's existing feed

So how do you do that when a repo does not include any identifying information in the release title?

[C0rn3j]

So how do you do that when a repo does not include any identifying information in the release title?

Use a good reader that can filter by more than just the title

https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/10_filter.html#with-the-search-field

[drandarov-io]

So how do you do that when a repo does not include any identifying information in the release title?

Use a good reader that can filter by more than just the title

https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/10_filter.html#with-the-search-field

Let me rephrase for you. Look at https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/releases
Please tell me: Can you see anything that can be used to tell pre-releases and releases apart?

[C0rn3j]

Huh, that's unfortunate, the API does not discriminate the two at all in this case - https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/releases.atom

I'd nicely ask upstream to put the information in, until GitHub picks up the slack.

[Deveshshukla36]

Interesting take! I think your view could work well too depending on the use case.

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[ReenigneArcher]

I doubt this bot message means anything. They auto-post this on all new discussions. Probably they just automated adding it to all old discussions.