Edit and delete anyone's comments on commits, pull requests, and issues

[norwd]

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To be direct; I think that the ability to edit other peoples comments should be moved from the write role to maintain. I manage a large private repo where company developers and outside collaborators need the write role to push, since forking would be against company policy. However, we've recently discovered that the write role allow everyone in the repo to edit the review comments, even of our admins. This has already resulted in misuse and I can't find any way of disabling this.

The Repo Roles Docs say that write permissions and higher are allowed to "Edit and delete anyone's comments on commits, pull requests, and issues". Since lowering the permission to read or triage would prevent the ability to open PRs, that route isn't an option.

If there is any way to prevent org members from editing each other's comments while preserving the ability to push to feature branches and open pull requests, I'd welcome the help. However, I cannot see why this ability was ever introduced below the admin level? I can see the need for moderation (especially in public repos), but why not have a separate moderate role, or at least have this configurable. As it is now there's no option to grant a developer the minimum permissions necessary to do their job while still controlling their access to moderation tools.

As I've said, we've already had instances of abuse of this functionality and I'm now in need of a way to manage this access, so I would really appreciate a way of doing so.

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[ebndev]

Hi @norwd thanks for posting in GitHub Discussions!

I've gone ahead and moved this post to our Repositories category, as this topic may be more relevant there and will ensure your feedback can be reviewed by the proper GitHub team.

[norwd]

Thanks @ebndev, I wasn't sure what category permissions management fit into, by Repositories makes sense now that I think about it 😅

[kikaragyozov]

This would be a nice change. Is there any reason why though we're allowing owners of repositories to edit content posted by other users? This seems very dangerous.

I actually reported a GitHub account that was promoting malware, and one thing I noticed is how the owner blatantly re-edited posts to "positive feedback", making everything look pink on the outside, but if you were remotely tech-savvy and knew how to view the edit history, you'd be surprised at what the original contents/messages were - malware reports.

[norwd]

It's worse than that @kikaragyozov, it's not just owners that can edit other people's comments, anybody with write access can! That includes external collaborators and bot accounts for third-party integrations.

Imagine if that account had a GitHub application that user's granted write 😱

[JaredLenos]

This feels like an oversight on the part of GitHub's access levels. Write access roles with the ability to delete OTHER people's comments seems like granting moderator or 'Maintain' level abilities to all repository collaborators. Can this be seriously re-evaluated, or granted as a selected repository right via repository and organizational roles? It feels naturally imbalanced to say that a reviewer's comments could be deleted rather than acknowledged for historical continuity and transparency during code change activities.