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[CI][Docs] Pull requests closed by the PR limit workflow cannot be reopened by their authors #54696
Description
Describe the bug, including details regarding any error messages, version, and platform.
The PR limit workflow closes a pull request that takes a contributor over the limit, and both its comment (.github/workflows/pr_limit/comment.md: "you are welcome to reopen this one") and the docs (docs/source/developers/bug_reports.rst: "Once one of your other pull requests has been merged or closed, you can reopen it") say that the author can reopen it later.
In practice the author cannot. After #54656 was merged, which brought me below the limit, reopening #54657 (closed by the workflow) fails:
$ gh pr reopen 54657 -R apache/arrow
API call failed: GraphQL: Could not open the pull request. (reopenPullRequest)
Presumably GitHub does not let an author without repository access reopen a pull request that was closed by an account with write access.
Either the comment and the docs could ask the author to request a reopen from a committer or collaborator (the workflow already leaves alone a pull request reopened by someone with repository access, see .github/workflows/pr_limit/check.js), or the workflow could let authors reopen their pull requests, e.g. by reopening them itself once the author is below the limit.
Component(s)
Continuous Integration, Documentation
Activity
pearu commentedon Oct 20, 2026
Some data on the bot workflow so far, covering all 232 pull requests created since it was introduced on 2026-09-14:
Using a previously merged pull request in apache/arrow as a sign of an established contributor:
In summary, the bot catches likely AI slop that is about 10 % of all PRs, while about 70 % of the genuine contributors it hits have not returned so far.