Use case
A review queue a maintainer can keep up with
Maintaining is mostly reviewing, usually in the evening, often on a change from somebody you have never met.
The queue is the job
A contributor opens a pull request, you ask for two changes, they force push, and the thread you wrote is gone. That interaction costs a maintainer their evening and a contributor their enthusiasm, and it is entirely avoidable.
What helps most
- Threads that survive the force push a first-time contributor will inevitably do
- A diff against the merge base, so unrelated commits from main are not in the review
- Lockfiles and build output collapsed, so the actual change is on the first screen
- Closing keywords that cannot fire from a code sample in the documentation
Rules that hold without a bot
Protected branches enforce approvals, resolved conversations, and checks from your existing CI. There is no separate bot to install, configure, and keep running.
It stays yours
MIT licensed, self-hosted, ordinary bare repositories on disk. If the project outgrows this forge or the project ends, the history is portable because it was never anywhere else.
Host your project on your own terms
Open source, and specific about the part of the workflow maintainers spend their time in.