Increased Project Item Limits Full Public Preview

[ebndev]

Increased item limits on projects

This public preview increases the limit of project items from 1.2k to 50k per project. Read more details in our changelog.

Thank you for participating in the increased project item limits public preview. Please leave your feedback below on what is working well, any bugs you encounter, and what else you’d like to see!

Opting out

If you encounter bugs that are significantly deteriorating your daily workflow, please let us know what they are in the comments below. If you would like to opt out of the beta, you have the ability to opt out in the project settings.

Please note that if your project has surpassed the 1.2k item limit and the project is then opted out, then users will only be able to see the first 1.2k items of the project. To make the project usable again, you will need to archive items to get below the 1.2k limit again.

Additionally, please note that the increased item limit will be fully rolled out in the coming weeks without an opt-out option. We’re actively addressing reported bugs, so keep your feedback coming!

[gauthierpetetin]

Hello, since this update was deployed, filters based on title are no longer working in Github Project.
Here my filter:

title:"*Bug Report" -title:"*duplicate*" 

The purpose of this filter was to:

• Show issues with title that has the following format: "vx.y.z Bug Report" where x, y, z are integers
• Hide issues with title that includes "duplicate" string

Since the update was deployed, all issues are hidden, the view is empty.

[Dpartk]

"; v@

[Xevion]

@adlai Did you ask ChatGPT to "use lots of big words and make my paragraphs as verbose and long as possible" when you wrote this comment?

[PTT-20250404-WA0000]

Richard Reukema wrote,

[a good workaround]

If I may explicate, for the benefit of folks [like me!] less familiar with the full taxonomy of project management features offered both by and outside of github:

I would use tags, as this is a good use case for that feature - it removes convention from string fields

One of the most pernicious unintended evils that arises in long-lived feature-crept applications, especially when multiple individuals collaborate, is the undocumented invariant. One simple example of undocumented invariants could be the C-style int return code, where zero usually means that desirable side-effects occurred, and nobody has any idea whether any side-effects hinted by nonzero return codes were desirable without reading amounts of documentation not determinable in advance from the error code alone.

How is this relevant to the workaround in question?

The following intermediate navigation list within the documentation for Issues is required reading before marking my comment Off-topic: different fields and custom field types

I'll cut myself short, to avoid wasting too much of your time; most of the useful string descriptions for Issues are actually elements from much smaller spaces, than the complete space of arbitrarily editable strings. Tags [aka Issue Types] are a way of defining, preferably with agreement of project maintainers, a preferably short list of significant words, and then the arbitrarily eloquent opinions can go in a separate field that doesn't cause unexpected failures in sorting code that must make decisions based on the content of these descriptions.

[theRealRobG]

I've found that distinct iterations that share a name are now grouped together in the Table Layout when before they weren't (e.g. 2 iterations named Friday but applying to different days now have their items grouped together whereas before this was not the case).

How this impacts me:
I use Projects (probably unconventionally) to organize my personal work schedule, utilizing it as a much more complex and fully customizable "TODO" tracker. As a quick summary, I have an iteration of length 1 day, and continuously add one for each workday (naming Monday to Friday). This means that occasionally I have iterations that share a name (e.g. 2 iterations named Friday). Previously this worked and now I see that they are being combined into a single section on the Table Layout when grouping by iteration. I'm not sure if the issue is specific to this preview or if it's just a new problem. As an extra note on my workflow, I only use items, as I don't need anything more than what an item gives me in functionality to track what I need to track.

[theRealRobG]

Hmm... That would be a little tricky as they represent the days of the week; however, I realize now that I can use a "Field type" of "Date" and achieve the same @current view I had by filtering for @today, so I believe I can work around it. I'll follow up if I run into any other issues. Thanks for looking into this!

[evi-liu]

Awesome, thanks!

[theRealRobG]

Actually, is there any option when grouping by a "Date" field in the "Table Layout", to include the day in the header summary? Currently it displays just the month abbreviation, day of month, and year (e.g. Feb 28, 2025)... At least with my locale (US East Coast).

[theRealRobG]

@evi-liu I've now found that when I have a "Board" Layout, that is filtered for <date-field>:@today, when adding an item to one of the columns it does not automatically create the item with the <date-field> updated to @today. This means that I get a message that "The new item is hidden by this view's filters." and I need to open the item and manually update the value of the <date-field>.

If I "Group by" the <date-field> it is automatically added, but this creates unnecessary clutter in the view as all items fall in the same group (as they are filtered to only come from that group).

Also, if I "Slice by" the <date-field> and select it from the side menu it also works to be automatically added, but similar to above this seems like unnecessary clutter.

Is this a new bug as part of the trial or something that has long existed when filtering for @today?

[harrymcgOS]

When you export a view now, I'm having issues I didnt have yesterday. It seems I can't export the full # of tickets? I've refreshed, waited longer, refreshed again and still nothing...

This is a really powerful function just to sense check and play with the data. It's quite frustrating that this has seemingly broken for no reason? And whilst I know it seems trivial, in this case I have 70 tickets and 66 get exported, not having the complete list is the biggest issue.

[evi-liu]

Thanks for reporting! We did recently change the export behavior to only export the rows that have loaded into the project. If you've given the project time to load in all the items and they're not all exporting, that's indeed a bug. I've logged it for our team to take a look!

[harrymcgOS]

Thanks @evi-liu , I figured that was the case, though it's not loading even after waiting ~30 seconds. Even some loading feedback so we know that it hasnt actually finished loading would be helpful.

[evi-liu]

You may have to scroll to make sure all of the items are loaded.

[evi-liu]

Could you let me know if fully scrolling down on the page allows you to export all of your desired items?

[umhan35]

The date format parsing cannot handle 2025-2-27 but requires a preceding zero now 2025-02-26. Example filter -end-data:"<2025-02-27"

[evi-liu]

Thanks for reporting! I have it logged as a bug on our team backlog now.

[Aboisier]

I've encountered a similar issue with sorting strings. I have a "Release" field containing SemVer version numbers, and previously, they sorted correctly like this:

1.1.0 1.2.0 1.10.0 

However, now they sort like this:

1.1.0 1.10.0 1.2.0 

I understand this behavior for a text field, but I really appreciated the convenience of having version numbers treated as actual versions. Now, I have to pad with zeros to maintain order, which feels a bit tedious.

[1800PROWORK]

Please include details

[Diana-Cherry-8]

It would be great if issues could be closed directly from the board without opening them. For example, an additional "Close issue" option could be added to the three-dot menu.

[evi-liu]

Thanks for logging this feature request! We will prioritize this alongside our other feature requests.

[gitarno]

I believe it is related to this item, but I noticed that Issues can be blocked, it would be nice if this function was also more accessible in the panels, including in the filter. It could avoid the need to create situations, columns or tags for this!

[NISH1001]

Hi,
The filters aren't working.

For example I don't see any cards assigned some week tags:

week:"Week 25.2.1","Week 25.2.2","Week 25.2.3","Week 25.2.4","Week 25.2.5","Week 25.2.6","Week 25.2.7","Week 25.2.8","Week 25.2.9","Week 25.2.10" 

This stopped working with the new updates. Can you help please

[NISH1001]

Hi,

Thank you for the prompt reply. Here's the overall view that shows only the first match rendered (rest are not showing up)

Thanks

[jayspadie]

Hi @NISH1001 , thanks for the additional information and your patience as we investigate this one. Since you're filtering on an iteration field, a great workaround would be to filter relative to the current week using the @current keyword. In your case, it looks like you want something like: week:@current-5..@current+4. That filters the week iteration field to return values within the range of 5 iterations before the current week through 4 iterations after the current week.

Please give that a shot and let us know if that works for you. Heck, you might even like it better since you won't have to keep adjusting your filters each week. Of course, we'll get this fixed regardless. Thanks again for bringing it to our attention!

[NISH1001]

@jayspadie Thanks for the @current filter. That feels more tangible. Looking forward for the week-based filter because the original view I had also helps in getting overall timeline-view for the entire PI we planned ahead.
Appreciate your reply.

[fernandofloresg]

I'm also facing this issue, in my case, this filter allows me to have iterations from "Q1 - Iteration 1" to "Q1 - Iteration 6" with just "iteration: Q1 - Iteration" filter. I'm only interested to display iterations from the current quarter not next quarter. Using current as filter will show iterations from next quarter at some point.

[evi-liu]

These bugs should now be fixed! ✨ Thank you for your patience, and let us know if you're still encountering it.

[thuhanu01]

I can't filter by status. If this is a bug, please fix it. If not, please let me know how I can filter by status.

[evi-liu]

Can you try lowercasing status?

So like this: -status:Done

That should fix it, I think, but let me know.

[BeckyMedlin]

Filtering is definitely not a great user experience. I used to be able to filter by selecting the three dots to the right of the column title and make my selection(s). This is not functioning as it did previously and is frustrating. Now, I have to know exactly what the name of the filter is an apply it in the search bar. Seems that the filtering functionality has regressed significantly.
Additionally, when I clear the search query, the dropdown menu that displays continuously displays and there isn't an easy way to remove it from view.

[callaway-james-delano]

The best feature of this product doesn't work!!!

There seems to be a bug with this beta where the drag-and-drop feature to move tasks between status columns doesn't work. Please fix!

[evi-liu]

Hi there, this seems to be a bug unrelated to this public preview, but affecting many project boards. We are actively working to resolve it, and sorry for the inconvenience!

[jayspadie]

@callaway-james-delano thanks for reporting and apologies for the disruption. As @evi-liu noted, it was an unrelated change behind a feature flag that seemed to affect Windows machines. We've disabled that flag now. Please let us know if you continue to have any issues with drag-n-drop. Thanks again.

[callaway-james-delano]

It's back! Thank you!!

[RyderRobin]

Thanks for the update! Definitely helpful and have not had any new issues.

One feature that would be helpful is to have the ability to show the Issue Number separate from the Issue Title. Would allow sorting by issue age and ability to use the export data to reference the Issue Numbers cleanly from the project board data.

[evi-liu]

Thanks for logging this feature request! We will prioritize this alongside our other feature requests.

[Alex-ley-scrub]

it's very laggy (EDIT: on a view with 557 items)? Performance is terrible - can't quickly scroll through a lot of items anymore and we could do that fine before (i.e. quickly scroll from the top of the project view to the bottom, we now need to scroll and wait for it to load multiple times). It seems to be degraded performance related to the virtualized rows?

[lerebear]

This is a step backwards for UX for me. The reasoning that it benefits projects with a large amount of issues just isn't compelling to me. Perhaps there is a way to toggle this functionality if required?

@BoltTouring thank you for the feedback. While this update is still in preview you may opt out of it from the "Danger zone" section of the main settings page of a project as detailed here.

However, we are unlikely to support the old UX beyond the preview period because it could not scale to larger use cases, and we do not have the resources to maintain two architectures. As @evi-liumentioned, our goal during this preview period is to close the gap to the old experience wherever possible, so we appreciate your patience as we work through incoming feedback and associated fixes.

And pretty often the whole view just goes empty/blank/black and you need to do a page refresh to see them again 😢

@Alex-ley-scrub sorry to hear this. Are you able to record a video or describe in more detail the circumstances that lead to this bug? If you would prefer not to post that publicly, you can send it to me via email (my GitHub username at github.com)

I am no longer able to load my most current iterations as it seems to load forever past the first 100 iterations

@tamidodo could you please describe how, if at all, the view you are using is filtered? Assuming that you're primarily interested in your most recent iterations, then I think it may help to adjust your filters. For example, if you are interested in the three most recent iterations, applying a filter like iteration:>=@current-3 will likely fix your loading issue. If you are indeed auditing all your iterations, then any further details as to how the view is organized (e.g. is there any grouping or sorting applied to the view? is it a table or a board view?) will help us investigate further.

[danny-mcg]

Hey @evi-liu and @lerebear,

we're currently working with a project that includes 11,391 items, including parent issues. Unfortunately, we're experiencing significant performance issues:

• Loading items takes a very long time and sometimes gets stuck entirely
• Bulk editing items slows things down even more
• Performance drops drastically when multiple users (e.g. 2 or more) are working in the project simultaneously
• In some cases, the page turns completely black and becomes unresponsive, forcing us to reload and start over
• We're about to onboard even more team members, which makes this issue even more critical.

Since you mentioned that performance is a top priority, is there anything you would like to investigate on your end? Let us know if we can provide any additional info.

Thanks!

[lerebear]

@danny-mcg could you please send me the URL of your project and, if possible, a video of a typical session that exhibits the above issues? My email address is my GitHub handle at github.com. We'll use that information to review your project configuration and inspect your network traffic patterns to see if we can identify the source of the problem.

[admin-accoladepro]

Similarly to Charles (comment above), We have view with less than 100 items in a View and the lag is insane.
I don't see the point of increased limit if you make all projects from all customers barely usable...
Any ETA on an update to get back to previous performances?

Thanks

[Ifycode]

Hi @github@community
There's now an annoying loader that initially shows up and make cards and the columns disappear in the cards/column area, when you filter by clicking on the labels on the project board (and the labels list on the left side disappears briefly too) 😩 The initial loader also happens if you click on the labels listed on the left side. This really puts me off.

It used to be really smooth and fast, with no break in between, with only project cards appearing or disappearing as needed immediately. It's one of the things that make the project board a project board. Please help resolve, and make it clean (great) again. Thanks for all you do.

Video

annoying_initial_loader_github_project_board.mp4

[Ifycode]

Still annoying and not glorious as before @jayspadie, but thank you.

[Ifycode]

The changes disrupt my workflow and preferences so much.
I think opting out of the "increased project item" update works for me.
Maybe in the future I'll join back - who knows? 🤷🏽‍♀️
But for now I've opted out, and my project board is back to the way I love it ❤️

[Ifycode]

This part is scary though. I do hope this doesn't happen.

Additionally, please note that the increased item limit will be fully rolled out in the coming weeks without an opt-out option. We’re actively addressing reported bugs, so keep your feedback coming!

[Ifycode]

No sure what the things you've written mean @adlai
Allow GitHub peeps to see comments that matter 🙏🏽

[jmssltd]

Hi GitHub Team,

1. It appears that when filtering project boards - the filters randomly leave the view of some columns as shown in the image below:

2. Additionally, some columns on the board are missing and a refresh of the board is required to restore those.

3. Also, at times the filter selection doesn't seem be applied properly with non-relevant items still showing on the board.

This has only really been noticed since 'Increased items preview' was made available to us.

[jayspadie]

Thanks for your feedback, @jmssltd. We're investigating all reports of filtering issues and finding a few edge cases here and there. We're not aware of any general issues that would prevent some columns to fail to show. If there are many board columns, we do paginate additional columns while scrolling to the right. Is this what you're seeing? Is the column pagination not working consistently for you?

If there are any particular filters that don't seem to be getting applied as expected, it would be really helpful if you could provide the filter string here to help us investigate. Screenshots of any filters and items (redacted as you see fit) are always helpful and appreciated. Thanks again!

[Diana-Cherry-8]

Hi, it seems like this might be an issue.

Empty new issue when using "Reference in a new issue" from full-screen issue view.

Preconditions: There is an issue with at least one comment.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open an issue.
2. Find a comment.
3. Click on the three-dots menu.
4. Click "Reference in a new issue".

Expected result: A new issue is opened with the comment text and signature automatically added (this is my assumption).
Actual result: An empty new issue page is opened.

Note: If the same action is performed from the board (clicking on an issue, scrolling to comments, and selecting "Reference in a new issue"), a modal window appears with the comment text automatically included.

From issue


From board

[evi-liu]

Thanks for reporting! I've passed it along to the team, and we are looking to fix it.

[akselinurmio]

It seems to me that this preview has changed the sorting order of groupings (in a table layout at least) from case insensitive to case sensitive. Please consider reverting that and keep the sorting case insensitive.

[evi-liu]

Hm, I'm not able to reproduce on my end. Could you give me an example of what your orderings were before and what they are now?

[jayspadie]

Hey @evi-liu , here's an example of what @akselinurmio is referring to. It's known behavior at this time, but understandably not necessarily desired.

• Filtering is case insensitive.
  • Here, I am filtering on "hello", matching regardless of casing
• Slice and group values (and ordering) from the project items are case sensitive.
  • Here, we get 3 different groups/slices based on casing, with uppercase "Hello" ordered first.

[shreyas-s-rao]

Facing the same issue here. I would have expected a list of all such changes to be announced before rolling them out.

[evi-liu]

We are looking into this to ensure the sorting remains case insensitive. Apologies for the disruption, and thanks for the patience!

[ArnaudBarre]

Can you avoid putting a bright "Increased items preview" when the board is less than 100 tickets and we absolutely don't care about this feature?

[evi-liu]

I hear you, and apologies for the distraction. The green preview pill follows a standard GitHub pattern to highlight new features. We’re aiming to move this feature out of preview soon, so it won’t be around for long. Appreciate the feedback!

[aardappel]

Drag and drop of items does not respect the drop location.

If I drag a status "Priority 1" item (in the Table view) to status "Priority 2", and release it near the start of "Priority 2", it always puts it at the end of "Priority 2"

It be more helpful if it inserted it at the dropped location, since likely I am indicating that it should become an item early in "Priority 2" or "Milestone 2".

If using the drop target is not technically possible, it would make a lot of sense to at least insert as close as possible to the originating label, so if you move something up in the label list, it gets inserted at the start, and if you move it down in the label list, at the end. Failing that, inserting at the start is generally more useful for a new item than at the end.

[aardappel]

Ah interesting. So essentially, the manual order is some interleaving of all items in all groups, which would become obvious if you removed the grouping. But that interleaving is invisible to the user when using grouping, thus resulting in unexpected behavior. Because of the way the UI is represented, the user would probably expected the manual order to only apply relative to items within the same group.

[jayspadie]

@aardappel Yes, each project item has a manual order/position value that serves as the order tie-breaker anywhere that multiple items are rendered. That applies within a group or ungrouped, sorted or unsorted, etc. A newly added project item begins at the bottom of all other items, but its position can be updated via drag-n-drop relative to other items. That works even when grouped (with or without additional sorting), with the exception of this particular scenario/bug when the view is also sorted by the same grouped field.

So, for example, if one drags item X above item P in a group, then X will be above P in all views (grouped or not) if the order is not otherwise determined by the Sort by field(s) of that view.

[jayspadie]

@adlai, thanks for your feedback. The manual positioning I described is an implementation detail that isn't intended to be visible in the UX. I only mention it here as part of a complete response from investigating the bug that @aardappel reported. This internal manual position simply provides a relative ordering of project items based on the user explicitly specifying a position via drag-n-drop in various views including tables and boards, and the actual value could change over time as needed to maintain that relative position after multiple item moves and inserts.

I certainly wouldn't consider our custom fields for defining item attributes that can subsequently be used to configure grouping, sorting, and slicing as a jury-rigged solution for ordering, but if you have a particular scenario where you feel like our support for automatic sorting and manual ordering is lacking, then we'd like to know more details.

Of course, this conversation is diverging a bit from the scope of our Increased Project Item Limits Preview since the support for sorting/ordering hasn't changed with this update for increased limits, so I would recommend submitting a feature request as a new Projects and Issues discussion if you would care to do so. Thanks again!

[ResearchScientist]

Suggestion: When adding a task list to the comments in a draft, include a field that tallies the number of checkboxes. So we can view our task progress on the draft itself.

[evi-liu]

Thank you for the feedback! As this community discussion is dedicated to the increased project limits public preview, do you mind opening a feature request for this here?

[trinode-work]

We've got a large project and the large limits with lazy loading is incredibly painful for things that are moved to columns programatically - they go to the bottom, so to see recently progressed items we have to lazy load many times

It'd be good to have a jump to bottom button or to be able to configure items not specifically dragged to a location to appear at the top of the column

[lerebear]

Thank you for the feedback @trinode-work. Could you please confirm what view type you are using and how exactly you are moving items programatically? My hunch is that you are using the board view and that you move items via the built-in workflows (e.g. when an item is closed, set it's status to "Done"), but I wanted to confirm.

[lerebear]

@trinode-work, I should also add that the updated filter may provide you with a serviceable workaround for your problem. For instance, adding state:closed updated:>@today-1w will filter your view down to things that were closed in the last week, which will likely be a much smaller set of items that does not require as much scrolling.

[mikz]

It would be extremely useful to be able to show reactions on the dashboards. Items can have reactions like thumbs up, but there is no way ti display it on the dashboard. Not even in a table or anywhere (that I've found).

[chrisjacobs91]

Is there a limit to how many items can be displayed on the screen at once in the table view? When we have a broad filter, showing all issues for future weeks (plus the past 2 weeks), we seem to get to a point where new tasks are being hidden. This is very difficult to work with as they are hidden before we can assign them to people, so they do not show up in more specific filtered views (such as a user's own tasks).

To clarify, this is the view we are using:

If I add a task to the bottom of this table, it only briefly appears. This problem doesn't exist on views with less tasks, or on this view when we have less tasks on it.

[jayspadie]

@chrisjacobs91 thanks for your report and sorry to hear that things are acting strange. The short answer is that no, there should not be a practical limit on the number of items you can see is your example view. If you add a new item for "April Week 3", then it should remain visible in that group.

I've not yet been able to repro this issue myself, but I can get it to incorrectly show a warning that the newly added item won't be visible because of the filtering (image below). That warning is generated on the client, but it's apparently failing to correctly determine that the new item in that group will match the iteration filter week:>=@previous-1.

To help us troubleshoot:

• Are you seeing that warning that the item will be hidden?
• Can you confirm that the item is actually hidden?
• Does the item show up if you click to refresh the page on that view?
• Finally, can you please check the project settings for that "Week" iteration field, and let us know if there are duplicate iterations named "April Week 3" (perhaps from last year)?
  • Iterations with the same name are known to cause some problems with filtering/slicing/grouping.

We typically load the first X project items for each group, then load additional items as the user scrolls down for more. We've had a few cases in the past where collapsed or sparsely populated groups created a situation where we were not triggering the additional loading of items, but it's my understanding that we have fixed those edge cases. I thought perhaps that this was another new example, where the additional item exceeds the first page of items but we weren't refreshing the view correctly to account for it, but I've not yet been able to repro it. Thanks for any additional information you can provide to help us determine the cause.

[evi-liu]

Thanks for all the feedback on the full public preview of increased project item limits! Over the past two months, we've resolved dozens of bugs based on your reports.

As shared in our early April changelog, the ability to opt out will be removed today. Any projects that previously opted out will now be automatically opted in, and all projects will have the new limit of up to 50,000 items 🚀

[Alex-ley-scrub]

this still feels horribly slow compared to how it used to - for both reasonably small views and especially for larger ones

[lerebear]

I've also noticed the issue filtering condition like "Iteration 82.." or the "Iteration 81..Iteration 83" range is no longer supported.

@olbouss this bug should now be fixed. Please let us know if you encounter further problems with that feature.

[olbouss]

@lerebear, thanks for the "Iteration 82..Iteration 86" broken filtering fixed.
I've also tested the "Iteration 82.." condition, and the outcome renders only the Iteration 82 issues. I expected to see the remaining issues for the upcoming iterations (> Iteration 82). Likewise, neither the "..Iteration 82" condition applies.

[lerebear]

@olbouss, in order to filter by open-ended ranges using the .. operator you will need to add a wildcard (*) to the open side of the range e.g. "Iteration 82..*" or "*..Iteration 82". I believe this is consistent with our filtering docs, but if you know of other documentation that suggests otherwise please let me know and I will look to correct it.

[olbouss]

Thanks, @lerebear. The syntax for the open-ended range may have changed since I used it last time. The wildcard does play the trick.

[saurabhcoded]

Good

[RometKallas]

Can we please have a setting or something that when I want to quickly create a task I don't get that intermediary popup of choosing a template. I simply want to start a task

1. Start writing in the shortcut window
2. Click enter
3. Start writing the task description, no template popup please

[anhofmann]

Yes please! Everone in our team reacted negatively on this change. We don't use issue templates, so this is just another step in the way of getting stuff done.

[mihkelvaher]

YES! That template question completely breaks the flow. Maybe it can be made as an opt out setting?

[mikk89p]

Yes! The template popup should be optional!

[Aanhane]

Maybe a split button would help, + for new task, dropdown for other repos/templates

[martroosaare]

yes!

[ivantechfr]

Honestly… 50k items? That’s wild (in a good way). Huge upgrade from 1.2k — thanks for that.
So far it works great. My laptop hasn’t caught fire yet
Just a tiny bit of lag when opening very big views and sometimes the scroll jumps, but nothing scary.
A small loading bar and a louder “are you sure?” before opting out would be nice.
Overall: love it. Keep it coming