Bot accounts cannot be blocked

[ashkitten]

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Bot accounts, such as Copilot or Dependabot, are unable to be blocked via the Blocked Users options in account settings. Attempting to search for the bot's name will only bring up the related user account (dependabot-bot) instead of the bot account (dependabot[bot]).

This renders it impossible to make use of the warning on repositories that receive bot contributions:

(Claude is unaffected by this issue because the email address it uses in commits is tied to a user account, not a bot account)

[github-actions[bot]]

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[itxashancode]

I ran into this exact limitation last year. GitHub’s Blocked Users list explicitly excludes system bots like dependabot[bot] and github-actions[bot]. You cannot add them there, and the UI warning is misleading because it points to a setting that does not support system bots.

If you want to restrict those bots, you need to handle it at the repository level. For Dependabot, remove the dependabot.yml file or disable the feature in your repo settings. You can also add branch protection rules that require human reviews before merging, which stops bot PRs from auto-merging. If you are trying to stop GitHub Actions from opening pull requests, go to Settings > Actions > General and uncheck Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests.

The account-level blocked users feature only works for standard GitHub accounts. I would recommend opening a separate feedback issue asking GitHub to clarify that warning text. It currently points to a setting that cannot solve the problem you are seeing.

[ashkitten]

This is a feature request asking GitHub to allow blocking bots in order to be notified of their participation in a repository at a glance.