Pinned comments and +1 comment reduction

[azenMatt]

We’ve shipped two updates to GitHub Issues that make them easier to scan and help reduce noise.

Pin a comment on an issue

You can now pin a comment to the top of an issue from the comment ... menu. Pinned comments make it easy to surface key updates, decisions, or next steps, so anyone viewing the issue can quickly understand what matters most.

pin.mp4

Fewer low-quality comments

To help keep issues focused, we’ve added a small nudge that encourages people to react and subscribe instead of leaving comments like "+1" or "same here." This reduces noise, clutter, and unnecessary notifications, while still giving an easy way to show support and stay updated.

🌟Leave a comment!

Join the discussion and leave feedback in the comments below!

[P-r-e-m-i-u-m]

Use reactions (👍) instead of "+1" to save everyone a notification. Pin the best answer to the top so people don't have to hunt for it. It keeps the thread clean and actually helpful.

[matshch]

It would be great to have pinned comments in pull requests, as well as an API to pin comments programmatically.

[johnbillion]

This is good, but if somebody comments with +1 or similar, why not just automatically convert it to a thumbs up reaction without asking them? Nobody needs to see a +1 comment.

[jsoref]

That'd surprise users in strange ways. They'd probably just write longer (and less helpful) comments.

[kellertk]

Nice! API support for this (the pinned comments I mean)?

[azenMatt]

This is now in the API! https://docs.github.com/en/rest/issues/comments?apiVersion=2022-11-28#pin-an-issue-comment

[jsoref]

@azenMatt why is pin-an-issue-comment in apiVersion=2022-11-28 when the feature was introduced in 2026?

[gamer191]

Can you please consider enabling this for users with the triage permission? It doesn't make sense to me for users to be able to close issues, add labels, and mark issues as duplicates, but not be able to pin comments

[azenMatt]

Yes - we are going to add this 😄

[azenMatt]

Added!

[gamer191]

Legend! Thanks heaps…I’m extremely surprised that GitHub is so open to feedback from users!

[CBD-iBiZa]

It would be great to have them in the Dashboard Issue Preview (no pin function, an no message pinned for now)
In sub-issue preview, it's already there.

[azenMatt]

That's a bug ... we will get it fixed

[spenserblack]

To help keep issues focused, we’ve added a small nudge that encourages people to react and subscribe instead of leaving comments like "+1" or "same here." This reduces noise, clutter, and unnecessary notifications, while still giving an easy way to show support and stay updated.

This is great! I'm curious how it's implemented, though. A list of common not-so-useful phrases that a comment gets checked against? If so, is there a chance that at some point the community would be able to submit more phrases that trigger this alert via a PR?

[azenMatt]

yes exactly