Hide reviews by non-reviewers

…namely the gray review icon you see on random places:

Actually, this sort of stuff is common on any popular repository.

What is a “review by non-reviewer”: if the aria-label of the review icon reads “Only reviews by reviewers with write access count toward mergeability”.

In general, these reviews are not useful, however there are exceptions:

• Reviews by contributors or organization members (example). However I don’t find a way to tell if a user falls into this category (and if someone do, please leave a comment as it may also benefit other features of RGH).
• Reviews by yourself. This is in the same spirit as the rule above, except that we can reliably tell if a review is left by you or not.
• Reviews with a comment. They may still be of little value but the risk of filtering them out is not worth it.

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Implementation-wise, there are two places to look out:

• The timeline. This is where the feature would be most useful, probably in the same fashion as hide-low-quality-comments.
• The sidebar. I’m not sure about this, as it is less annoying and serves as a neat indicator that someone did review.

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Worth mentioning that GitHub sort of implemented this feature, in the sense of Preventing drive-by pull request approvals and requested changes. So maybe we should not implement it at all.

However, there are some caveats of GitHub’s solution:

• Too radical. To allow or not to allow, that’s a serious question. In particular, approvals from outside contributors are almost always useful.
• Some projects can’t employ it. Take the nixpkgs example above, this is a project consisting of thousands of maintainers, however only a handful of them are “committers” with write access, or “reviewers” regarding this issue. Maintainers review PRs in a regular manner, but those reviews will never be considered “valid” by GitHub.

Also, this is my 100th issue opened in RGH 🤯

[yakov116]

Github has on their roadmap an option to ignore them

[fregante]

Unfortunately it’s not easy to determine whether a review is spam or not. A comment-less review by a third party could be even left by the author of the request issue. While it’s not great that they left an empty review, it’s still a positive signal that we can’t hide.

I’d probably ask GH to allow reporting reviews as spam and deleting them instead