This comment in a Github issue conversation is an example of the surprise that the user experiences when they didn’t realize their actions in some other part of the system triggered automatic closure of the issue.

He pushed a commit to the Git repository with the title ‘fix #15: …’, and Github took the liberty of automatically closing the issue. The user caught this mistake (he didn’t intend to close the issue), and reopened it.

This is Gihub’s default behaviour, and AFAIK there’s no way to disable this behaviour. If you push a commit to Github that starts with ‘fix #ID:’, Github will close that issue in your repository.

The lesson for me here is that design software with the POLA in mind. Specifically, don’t make the software take actions unless the customer explicitly either takes that action, or approves that action.

Update 1: To identify this behaviour more easily, I’ll call this behaviour “Spooky action at a distance”.