How to completely remove an issue from GitHub?

409
votes

Is it possible to completely remove an issue from the GitHub issue tracker?

11
githubprivacyissue-tracking
An interesting side-question: How is this answer legally consistent? I don't know about the U.S. but in Europe one has author-rights (they go beyond copyright) that says one has control about how/if something is published. This means one can decide to withdraw a publication. This right can't even be transmitted to a third party (it's a moral right). – Willem Van Onsem
@CommuSoft Nice consideration. Maybe suing them through the Right to be forgotten is the best option for Europeans today. – Ciro Santilli 新疆再教育营六四事件法轮功郝海东
@CommuSoft Technically, you're able to edit the title / msg so I belive it would be easily defendable for GH. : ) – Marek Lewandowski
@MarekLewandowski: that's indeed a possibility given Github doesn't keep track of the changes (or you can at least remove history). I know Google faces the same problem with cached versions of webpages. In rare occasions you can for instance ask Google to remove certain pages/history for instance if your name has been cleared in court, you can ask to remove links to articles stating you were suspected of some crime. – Willem Van Onsem
@MarekLewandowski true for issue body, but not title, which shows undeletable "changed the title to" comments. – Ciro Santilli 新疆再教育营六四事件法轮功郝海东

11 Answers

41
votes

Update Nov 2018: You now can delete issues if you are a owner of the repository!
See "Github - remove issues entered in error"

Issue deletion

https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-github/deleting-an-issue mentions:

People with admin permissions in a repository can permanently delete an issue from a repository.

For other people (without permission), questionto42's comment shows that you can ask to GitHub support for the issue to be deleted, as illustrated here.

At May 2018, original answer:

Three 8 years later, and closing issues remains the answer (still no deletion possible).
See "The Ghost of Issues Past", where GitHub advise to check and close:

220
votes

No, the github API only allows you to open/close/reopen issues. Here's the Issues API docs.

62
votes

You can edit an existing issue (let's say if it's a duplicate) and you can change the title, description and target milestone to be something completely different. That's as close as you can get to removing the ticket, AFIK.

31
votes

For posterity: Deleting issues would be a bad thing, since in general they can be targets of associations on github.

But if you are willing to sacrifice the collaboration info, here is a "whack it with a sledgehammer" approach:

  1. Clone your original repo.
  2. Copy your issues via the Issues API.
  3. Delete the original repo; alternatively, chose a new name for your new repo.
  4. Re-create a new repo based on your clone.
  5. Re-create the issues you want to keep via the Issues API.

I imagine this could potentially lose a lot of other linking information as well such as forks, pull requests, etc.

28
votes

Public feature request

I wrote to GitHub in 2014-08 and https://github.com/jdennes replied by email:

Thanks for the suggestion. It's only possible to edit/clear the issue content currently. However I've added a +1 to this suggestion on our internal Feature Request List.

confirming it was not possible.

Best workaround so far

  • set the title to something that will never conflict with any search, e.g. a single dot ..

    This may not hide the history of your blunder entirely because of the automatic undeletable "changed the title to" comments.

  • make the body empty

GitHub staff has the power

If something is a security issue, contact GitHub staff, they usually reply quickly, and are able to remove issues for good as can be seen at: http://archive.is/OfjVt which has issue 1 and 3 but no 2.

10
votes

You can delete the entire repo if it's really important.

2
votes

Possible workaround

As of 04/2019 not all issues can be deleted current work around is to edit the issue then delete the edit history, the only downside is that the issue still exist and the old title could be seen.

Screenshot_20190419_072804

0
votes

You could by just asking to github to ban the user that created the issue 😁

Source: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/253#issuecomment-290944938

0
votes

Users are unable to do this, including repository owner.

But issues can be deleted by Github support. One may contact them and request deletion. It may be delayed or refused but it is an available option that can be used.

0
votes

Still impossible. Another workaround to the ones suggested in the other answers is to label the issue as "deleted" (or any other label you might fancy better), to be able to filter them out if you use the github API to retrieve them. Obviously you should use that specific label only for this purpose, setting the label when you close the issue.

0
votes
  1. You can create a new repository.
  2. Transfer (yeah it is possible) unwanted issues to the new repository.
  3. Then delete the new repository.