Comments Authored / Week

Last updated: October 27, 2026

Comments authored / week shows how many comments a typical active contributor leaves on other people's pull requests (PRs) in a week. It tells you whether review discussion is a shared practice or rests on a few people.

Why it matters

  • Review participation: shows who engages in review discussions and how much.

  • Mentorship: senior engineers who mentor through review often show higher values.

  • Balance: very high values for a few people can point to an overloaded reviewer or a bottleneck.

How it works

Comments authored / week = comments on others' PRs ÷ active contributor-days × 7

  1. Span collects PR comments. On GitHub: conversation comments, inline review comments, and the summary text of a submitted review (when it has text). On GitLab: merge request notes, minus system notes. On Azure DevOps: thread comments with text, minus system comments. On Bitbucket Cloud: PR comments.

  2. Span drops comments on the commenter's own PRs, deleted comments, comments that contain an Ignore PR Comments phrase, comments by ignored Git usernames, comments on ignored repositories and branches, and comments made on the commenter's out-of-office (OOO) day.

  3. Span keeps comments by people marked Contributor, dated by when the comment was written in your organization's time zone. Each reply in a thread counts as one comment.

  4. Denominator: active contributor-days: days a person marked Contributor wasn't OOO and had code activity (a commit, merged PR, PR review, or PR comment) that day or in the 30 days before it. Weekends count.

  5. Span divides and multiplies by 7. PR Comments Authored is the same count without the division.

Where to find it: Insights > Productivity > Quality > Code review, team and person Code review tabs, and custom dashboards, with percentile ranks. Catalog > Comments lists each comment.

Setup

  1. Connect your version control system.

  2. Under Settings > Metrics > Ignore PR Comments, add up to 50 phrases (for example "LGTM" or a bot's template text). Span drops any comment containing one of them, ignoring case.

  3. Add bot accounts to Ignore Git Usernames, and mark people who don't write or review code as Non-contributor in Settings > People management.

  4. Connect an OOO source (calendar or HRIS).

Things to know

  • Worked example. A reviewer writes 40 comments on teammates' PRs over two weeks and is OOO for 2 days, leaving 12 active days. Comments authored / week = 40 ÷ 12 × 7 = 23.3. Comments written on the 2 OOO days wouldn't count.

  • Comments on unmerged PRs count, including open and closed PRs.

  • Own-PR comments are matched by Git account. A comment from the author's second Git account on their own PR still counts.

  • Span counts more than GitHub's header. GitHub's comment count shows conversation comments only; Span adds inline comments and review summaries.

  • Bots: a bot counts only if it's mapped to a dev agent, and report pages hide dev agents by default.

  • Comments authored versus received: this metric credits the commenter and uses the comment date. Comments received / PR credits the PR author and uses the PR's merge date.

  • Reviewers keep people active. A person who only comments stays in the denominator for 30 days after that activity.

Related articles

Comments Received / PR Report

PRs Reviewed / Week Report

How to read Span's "/ week" metrics

Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.