Sunset notice for automatic watching of repositories and teams

[queenofcorgis]

On May 18, 2025, we’re deprecating the automatic watching of repositories and teams. We’re making this change in order to:

• Reduce notification noise: You’ll receive fewer unexpected notifications, especially when joining large organizations with many repositories.
• Improve efficiency: You’ll be able to focus on the notifications that matter most, without unnecessary subscriptions.
• Minimize confusion: You won’t have automatic watching behavior that some users found unclear or overwhelming.

Note

Existing repository subscriptions created through auto-watching will not be impacted. Users will remain subscribed to repositories or teams they were previously watching.

To review or adjust your current repository subscriptions, visit the Watching section. For more detailed notification preferences, head to Notification Settings.

Have questions or feedback, please share with us in the discussion below.

[IceUnite]

Thanks for the clarification! This is a welcome change — I often found myself overwhelmed by notifications from repos I wasn’t even aware I was watching.

For anyone wondering where to manage these settings, you can go directly to your Watching settings or customize more under Notification Settings.

💡 Tip: After joining a new organization, it’s a good idea to double-check your watch settings to avoid accidental noise.

Appreciate this update! 🙌

[labudis]

Thank you for your feedback @IceUnite!

The auto-watching feature has been deprecated today: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-22-sunset-of-automatic-watching-of-repositories-and-teams/

[labudis]

While the original purpose of automatic watching was well-intentioned, it has become increasingly unpredictable and unintuitive as GitHub Organizations have grown. We've heard from users who have unknowingly accumulated over 900,000 repository subscriptions due to automatic watching, making it nearly impossible to manage their notifications. To address this, we’ve decided to adopt a model where users can individually subscribe to the repositories that interest them, giving everyone greater control over their notifications.

[qgustavor]

Sure, for users from organisations that's understandable, but for people working on small projects on small groups it's weird to be. Unless I'm misunderstanding this change of people get reminded of this change I guess I (and maybe other people) can end missing notifications from future projects affected by this change. Deprecating it instead of making it disabled by default (or even making it more granular like "only if I created the repository" or "only if it's not part of an organisation"), IMHO, it's like throwing out the baby with the water.

[labudis]

@qgustavor Thank you for sharing your additional concerns and suggestions. The default setting for automatic watching was changed to "off" several years ago; however, this change was not applied retroactively to users who joined GitHub prior to its implementation. As a result, many long-time users continued accumulating subscriptions without realizing it.

When we analyzed usage data, we found that only 0.05% of GitHub users have opted to enable automatic watching. Given these very low opt-in rates and the negative side effects caused by automatic watching, we made the decision to deprecate this feature.

[allmazz]

It's definitely a regress. Please, bring it back.

[egrace479]

@labudis @queenofcorgis, this change has caused significant challenges, overhead, and trouble for those of us who do rely on this feature. As the first user to comment stated, those inundated by notifications have the ability to just turn it off when they get notified. However, for those of us that rely on watching, we've been consistently blindsided by the removal of this feature. There is no easy solution to fix this and it hurts open-source contributions by users opening issues and not realizing the developers may not receive notifications if they're not directly mentioned. This kind of back-and-forth in the community is part of what GitHub has done so well and why it's the repository of choice for code. Please fix this.

[Haroenv]

So will there be no way to opt-in to automatic watching? If I notice something I don't need I unsubscribe from the notifications tab, but not knowing about new projects within my org would be unfortunate. If automatic watching must be removed, can I still get notified when a repository gets created I have access to?

[labudis]

@Haroenv automatic watching has now been deprecated. However, by default you will receive notifications for Participating and Mentions in any of the repositories you have access to.

Getting a one-time notification when you gain access to a new repository sounds like a great idea! I will log that as a feature suggestion for the team to consider.

[mdccUVa]

I also think we need more flexibility to manage notifications of the organizations we are part of. If I am transferred ownership of an organization, or I just get promoted internally to a higher-responsibility role, I may want opt-in to all notifications regarding anything from that organization. That includes watching all the existing repositories, getting notifications for newly created repositories, and automatically watching all those too. Having to manually watch all repositories in an organization sounds cumbersome, and prone to missing critical notifications (e.g., new issues opened in repositories from the organization).
In my opinion, this should be an opt-in, per-organization option.

[egrace479]

As someone who relied on this feature for just this purpose, the quiet deprecation was quite problematic. It's also extremely cumbersome to adjust settings for all repos I need to monitor in orgs as compared to just clicking through to un-watch. Could we have a "not-watching" tab listing repos in orgs we own/our repos?

As others have stated in comments on this thread, please at least make it easier to bulk watch/find repos we aren't watching that we create. Missing issues and PRs is problematic.

[GideonBear]

If I may chip in; I suddenly didn't get notifications for newly created repositories anymore, which was very confusing. I do want to watch all repositories I create, but there doesn't seem to be an option to do this automatically anymore; so now I have to watch a repository manually when I create it (which is a pain).

I think this is a good change for repositories other people create that you have access to; but I don't think it's logical to not get any notifications from a repository I created.

[yellow5]

There is a downstream effect on Dependabot usage.

Since new repositories are not followed in my organization any longer, I no longer receive Dependabot notifications for new repositories. A hidden backlog of dependency updates now builds up that I have to actively seek out.

Prior to the deprecation, all update notices showed up in my Github notifications inbox to manage Dependabot updates.

Are there existing alternatives to receive automatic Dependabot notifications for new repositories with auto-watch disabled?

[yellow5]

Following up, I found that Dependabot has an assignees option (1).

I've updated new repo creation from my organization's templates to define that in .github/dependabot.yml

(1) https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/dependabot/working-with-dependabot/dependabot-options-reference#assignees--

[scarf005]

• Reduce notification noise: You’ll receive fewer unexpected notifications, especially when joining large organizations with many repositories.
• Minimize confusion: You won’t have automatic watching behavior that some users found unclear or overwhelming.
• Improve efficiency: You’ll be able to focus on the notifications that matter most, without unnecessary subscriptions.

afaik this feature was opt-in, so the reasoning is a bit confusing, as they chose it.
could it have been defaulted to disabled instead?

[qgustavor]

I guess this list was AI generated. 👀

[DanTup]

I was susprised to learn of this change today. I found an issue had been created in one of my personal repos, and I had not had any notification.

I definitely appreciate it was noisy (I'd often been given access to an org repo and been spammed loads overnight before I woke up and "Unwatched"), but for my own repos, it felt like a better default.

It would've been nice to have kept the option, but allow it to be scoped to only created repos. I fear that I (and many others) are going to accidentally miss out on notifications because we were used to the previous default and forget to Watch on new repos.

[dickermoshe]

I've had the same experience as @DanTup

A PR author emailed me after waiting a month. Was shocked to see so many issues and pull requests on the repo. I really felt bad and apologized to the users of my repo who thought this project was abandoned.

Please rethink this

[raine]

I noticed I've missed notifications in my new repos for weeks. Honestly, what the *** was GH thinking with this change?

Solo devs that helped GH grow to where it is now matter no longer? It's all about big orgs now?

[srgykuz]

Up. There should be an option that toggles automatic watching. You can make it off by default, but user should have ability to toggle it on.

[hazae41]

Days since last missed issue or pull request caused by this: 0

[georgefst]

So a user who creates a new repository will, by default, not be notified of issues and PRs, leaving potential contributors screaming in to the void?

That is utterly absurd. I've been thinking that GitHub decision making seems dysfunctional for a while. This might be the final straw.

[qgustavor]

That's one of the reasons I'm moving out of here. The other is that my home feed is now useless. 😑

[allmazz]

yes, and you will miss Dependabot issues/PRs too ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[mdierolf]

This is an absolutely horrendous change, I just spent an hour trying to figure out why the repositories that I created and am the only member of are not sending me ANY notifications.

And it's not like you just changed the default, you actually removed the auto-watch feature entirely, so now I need to write a script to go and auto subscribe to 100 repos.

At least give me a damn button to subscribe to an organization, or default it to "watch" if I created the repo or organization.

[mdierolf]

For anyone else discovering this idiotic issue, you can fix it by running this:

gh repo list YOUR_USERNAME --limit 1000 --json nameWithOwner -q '.[].nameWithOwner' \
  | xargs -I {} gh api -X PUT repos/{}/subscription -f subscribed=true

Swap YOUR_USERNAME with either your username or org

So you can actually track your own projects.

[Vallek]

Hi! I can't make it work unfortunately. Is it one line or two? I tried different ways but always got errors. Github Cli is installed.

[Jackenmen]

It's two lines. If you want it to be one line, remove the backslash from the end of the first line and then join it with the second line. This (ending line with a backslash) is how splitting a command over multiple lines works in Unix shells. On Windows it works differently so it's simpler to just join the lines, if you want something that works on all major systems. Also, on Windows you'll only have xargs if you have Git installed with the Unix tools option enabled.

[Vallek]

@Jackenmen Yeah I'm on Windows. I installed unix tools with git installer and it worked with backslash removed on git bash! Thank you!

[spenserblack]

I really wish there was at least a way to opt back in to auto-watching repositories under your own username. Whenever I create a new repository, I forget to watch it now, because frankly it just feels unnatural that a repository where I'm the sole administrator and maintainer isn't watched by me by default. I've already had at least one instance where I was unresponsive to an issue because I forgot to subscribe to the repo. Every time I make a new repository and forget to watch it, it becomes partially unmaintained because I won't be aware of issues without a @mention.

[mayerwin]

@labudis @queenofcorgis this change has created real overhead and trouble for those of us who actually relied on this feature.

As the first commenter pointed out, people who were drowning in notifications could just turn watching off the moment they got one. Those of us who depend on watching got the opposite: we were blindsided by the removal, with nothing equivalent to replace it. There is no easy fix on our side, and it quietly damages open source. Someone opens an issue or starts a discussion, and the maintainer may never hear about it unless they happen to be directly mentioned. That back and forth between users and maintainers is one of the things GitHub has always done best, and a big part of why it became the default home for code.

I just ran into this myself. While auditing my account, I found several open issues I had completely missed, only because newly created repos are no longer watched by default. I had to write a script to bulk re-subscribe to all of my repositories just to stop the bleeding, which rather proves the point that there is no built-in solution.

There is also a documentation problem. The official notification docs still state, word for word: "By default, you also automatically watch all repositories that you create and are owned by your personal account" (https://docs.github.com/en/subscriptions-and-notifications/concepts/about-notifications). The current behavior directly contradicts that. Whatever the merits of dropping automatic watching for repositories I was merely added to, the create-and-own case is different: it is the one GitHub still explicitly promises in writing, and the one maintainers most depend on. At a minimum, please honor that rather than silently breaking it.

The fix is straightforward. Please add a setting under notification settings, "Automatically watch repositories I create", with the same per-event control as the Watch dropdown (Issues, Pull requests, Discussions, Releases, Security alerts). Maintainers could then default to Issues, PRs, and Discussions and skip Releases, since we obviously know when we pushed one. Leave it on by default and let the people who want silence turn it off, which was always the easier direction to go.

[relikd]

Just one more drop on the stone. For months I have been apologizing to people that I missed their issue and did not get a github notification. Searching for a missing notification setting time and again. Weirdly enough, some repos worked fine, others did not. Only today I realized the culprit: new repos are not watched by default. At last, now I know how to fix it.

You cannot expect people to follow your blog posts or whatever. Frankly, I dont care about your updates. I just want to use this platform to release open source code. Imagine this: it took me over a year to notice that the default has changed – to my disadvantage. There isn't even a grayed out setting to indicate that you cannot change it back.

Now that I know, I may try to remember to watch it on the next repo I create. But before this knowledge, I would have never suspected that a repo I created is not watched automatically (especially because thats how it worked the past decade). I mean, what is the purpose of releasing open source software if you do not listen for feedback?

It saddens me utmost for the energy spent in the past weeks just finding the culprit. Please give back an option to auto-watch self-created repos.

[spenserblack]

I know I already commented, but I just have one more thing to say:

Being subscribed to the content you create is pretty much one of the rules of the internet. Make a post on social media? You get an alert when someone replies. Upload a picture or a video? You get notified when someone leaves a comment or like. Make an issue, PR, or discussion on GitHub, and you're subscribed to it. So what's baffling to me is that one of the goals is

Minimize confusion: You won’t have automatic watching behavior that some users found unclear or overwhelming.

I believe it's safe to say that a reasonable user would assume they are subscribed to content that they create. I understand that automatic watching might be overwhelming (but probably not confusing) to the most popular users, or for users that are part of a large team, but the majority of users aren't popular enough to want to ignore their own repository's activity IMO. This change seems to cater to a small set of users to the confusion of the majority.

It's such a strange decision to me that I'm actually wondering if this change is the result of a misinterpreted task description or something. Like, "oh no, we meant to disable automatic watching for your teams' repositories, not your repositories!"

Hope I'm not coming off as angry, but I'm just genuinely confused by this.