The 1,000 most starred repositories on GitHub, every one of them above 33,000 stars, were read on 4 October 2026 for how they take feature requests: the labels they use, the issue types, the issue templates and the Discussions categories. Then the requests themselves were read, 300,697 issues on 756 repositories and 51,014 ideas from Discussions on 477, with their state, close reason, dates and thumbs up.
877 of the 935 repositories with issues switched on mark feature requests, most of them with GitHub's default label, enhancement. Half offer a template for them, and 511 also keep an Ideas category in Discussions. The typical request has no thumbs up at all: 72.1 percent have none. The ones that collect more are closed as not planned less often and left open more often, from 26.1 percent open with no thumbs up to 52.9 percent with fifty or more.
id,star_rank,language,issues_on,request_markers,requests_read,read_whole,open,completed,not_planned,duplicate,closed_other,median_thumbs_up,requests_10_plus_thumbs_up,median_open_age_days,median_days_to_completed,issue_templates,feature_template,feature_template_form,discussions_on,idea_category,ideas_total,ideas_read,median_idea_upvotes
5,501-1000,Go,1,enhancement;feature;proposal,1058,1,502,550,6,0,0,0.0,54,3572.5,105.5,6,1,1,1,1,19,19,1
25,501-1000,Ruby,1,enhancement;issue type feature,187,1,0,80,104,3,0,0,0,,6.0,3,1,1,0,0,0,0,
Download the file, one row per repository. Repositories are numbered rather than named, and each row gives its band in the star ranking. It is free to copy, quote and use commercially. To cite it, link https://votefirst.app/en/data/github-feature-requests and give the read date, 4 October 2026.
How do GitHub projects take feature requests?
Almost all of them through issues, marked with a label. GitHub creates a set of default labels in every new repository, and the one it describes as marking new feature requests is enhancement.
| What the repository has | Repositories | Share |
|---|---|---|
| A label or issue type for feature requests | 877 of 935 | 93.8% |
| The enhancement label | 627 of 935 | 67.1% |
| The Feature issue type | 235 of 935 | 25.1% |
| An issue template of any kind | 646 of 935 | 69.1% |
| A feature request template | 484 of 935 | 51.8% |
| A feature request template written as a form | 305 of 935 | 32.6% |
| Discussions switched on | 577 of 1,000 | 57.7% |
| A Discussions category for ideas | 511 of 1,000 | 51.1% |
After enhancement, the commonest labels are feature, on 83 repositories, feature request on 47, and feature-request on 25. The Feature issue type is one of the three GitHub gives every organization, with task and bug.
On Discussions, 487 of the 511 categories for ideas are called Ideas, the name of the category GitHub adds by default, and 479 of the 511 also mark requests in their issues. Most projects that have an Ideas category take feature requests in two places.
How many thumbs up does a GitHub feature request get?
None, usually. On the 618 repositories whose requests were read whole, 146,033 in all, 72.1 percent have no thumbs up, 4.2 percent have ten or more, and 0.3 percent have a hundred or more. Of the 606 repositories with at least twenty requests read, 553 have a median request with no thumbs up.
Ideas in Discussions are upvoted with an arrow rather than a reaction, and can be sorted by it. The median idea has one upvote, 4.4 percent have ten or more, and 36.0 percent have no reply.
Do more thumbs up get a GitHub feature request built?
GitHub cannot say, because closing an issue as completed is its default and was its only option until 2022, when not planned was added. Completed is what a maintainer gets by pressing the close button, whether or not anything was built. So this table counts only requests filed from January 2023 to July 2026, on the 618 repositories read whole, and reports close reasons as GitHub records them.
| Thumbs up | Requests | Closed as completed | Closed as not planned | Still open |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 57,088 | 57.6% | 15.0% | 26.1% |
| 1 or 2 | 11,666 | 48.8% | 12.7% | 37.0% |
| 3 to 9 | 5,855 | 43.9% | 10.5% | 44.2% |
| 10 to 49 | 1,690 | 42.8% | 6.9% | 48.8% |
| 50 or more | 189 | 40.2% | 6.3% | 52.9% |
The rest, about one in a hundred, were closed as duplicates. Every step up in thumbs up meant fewer requests closed as not planned and more left open, and the median open request in this group was filed 562 days before the read.
The same shape turns up on every large tracker read so far. In the VS Code repository, requests past 20 upvotes escaped the bot that closes the rest and mostly waited in the Backlog. On JetBrains' tracker and Atlassian's, more votes meant fewer refusals and longer waits. On Bitwarden's Discourse forum, which tags what it ships, 34.2 percent of requests past fifty votes were released, and most of the rest are still open. At GitLab, 35.6 percent of paying customers' requests past fifty upvotes were built, and 48.3 percent of all its customers' requests are still open.
Should feature requests go in issues or Discussions?
The two behave differently once a request is in. On the 460 repositories whose ideas were read whole, 34,014 ideas, 87.7 percent are still open. 10.5 percent were closed as resolved, 1.1 percent as outdated and 0.7 percent as duplicates. Issues are closed far more readily: of the requests filed as issues since 2023, 29.7 percent are open.
An issue fits a request the team expects to act on, because it can be assigned, put in a milestone and closed by the change that ships it. A discussion fits an idea that needs talking through first, and an agreed idea can then be written up as an issue. Running both without saying which is for what splits the votes for one request across two places.
How do you request a feature on a GitHub project?
Search before writing. Most projects mark requests with a label, so is:issue label:enhancement in the repository's issue search finds the existing ones, and the Ideas category in Discussions holds the rest where it exists. If someone has asked already, a thumbs up on the issue or an upvote on the discussion adds to the count GitHub sorts by. Its search sorts issues by that count with sort:reactions-+1-desc. A comment that only says +1 adds nothing to it.
If nobody has, open a new issue and choose the feature request template, which half of the top thousand projects provide, or post in Ideas if the project asks for requests there. Describe the problem before the feature, because the problem is what a maintainer can weigh against everything else.
What does that mean for your own feature request board?
On GitHub, the vote is a reaction that needs an account, the count is one number among eight emoji, and a request with none is the normal case. A project that wants its users to vote has to accept that most of them never will, and that the ones who do are the users who already have GitHub accounts.
A board outside the repository is for the users who do not. On VoteFirst, voting is anonymous by default, Denied and Completed are columns on the board, and when a release includes a request, every voter who was signed in when they voted is emailed that release. VoteFirst has no GitHub integration. Running a roadmap in GitHub itself and adding a board to an open source project are each covered step by step.
How was this read, and when does it change?
GitHub's search API listed the 1,000 most starred repositories on 4 October 2026. For each, the REST API gave its labels, its issue templates and whether it uses the Feature issue type, and the GraphQL API gave its Discussions categories. A label counts as marking requests when its name, ignoring case and punctuation, is one of enhancement, feature, feature request, new feature, enhancement request, feature enhancement, request, feature idea, idea, suggestion, proposal or feature proposal. A category counts as one for ideas under the same test.
Issues were read up to 1,000 per label and ideas up to 1,000 per repository. 618 repositories had every request read and 460 every idea, and the figures on outcomes and thumbs up use only those, so a busy project's newest thousand requests do not stand in for all of them. Thumbs up and upvotes are counted on the read date. The public file holds one row per repository with no names, titles or authors.
The next read is due by 1 January 2027.
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