Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

Yeah, this depends on workflow. We generally send every piece of code to two reviewers but just wait for either one to accept, unless there's a particular reason that both should look at the review. This works well for us but I can see how it wouldn't work as well for people with other processes.

> The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from.

Yes, Phabricator's isn't perfect but it's the best of the ones I've tried, especially if everyone using it is familiar with the tool and uses it frequently (that is, you might forget to Clowncopterize once or twice ever, but then you'll know for the future). I used to use Kiln (http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/) which had a different approach for emails – they essentially debounce emails to have a half-hour delay and coalesce any emails within that timeframe together, so you get fewer emails but don't need to submit the collection of comments explicitly. Having tried all three choices, I'd say that they're all painful in different ways and I personally prefer Phabricator's approach.

Particularly, if you have a back-and-forth of changes on a PR, the inline comments that relate to lines that haven't changed stick around (and references to no longer connected comments are available in the UI). I find this huge for progressively dealing with things. And it does this whether you've force pushed a rebased cleanup or just capped another change onto the PR's branch.

And then there's the way phabricator manipulates your commit messages in rather elaborate ways that are often confusing or frustrating. It also shows that the authors don't have a lot of respect for the idea of using merge bubbles over squashing commits, and I much prefer bubbles. And because of using merge bubbles primarily, github can tell when you merge a PR even if you don't use its tools to do it.

And while I like the ability to batch comments, I don't like that it makes you always batch them. Sometimes I really only have one thing to say and it's way too easy to forget to submit.

Likewise I like the ability to do pre-review tests, but for a large codebase I also really love the commit-hook UI cycle of github's integrations with stuff like travis and circleci, because a lot of the things I've worked on in the last couple of years have full compile+test cycles in the 10s of minute ranges.

Two column layout, the batch commenting, pre-review-tests, and the code highlighting are all great. But I really prefer tools that really strongly integrate with git. I'm not really interested in vcs portability at this point.

I often wonder how many people who have really strongly negative opinions of GH PR workflows have been forced to use it with full forks instead of a shared repository. Honestly, github forks are terrible for anything but casual submission of open source patches (and even there I think there'd be better ways). I've seen people try to use them for more serious stuff and it never goes well.