Clarification on "edited" and "synchronize" values for the "action" property of IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent and PullRequestEvent

[Axel-NCHO]

Hello,

I work at Inria and I'm part of the CodeCommons project (which extends Software Heritage).
We're using GHArchive which is an archive of GitHub events that uses the /events api. According to its documentation, GHArchive stores raw events without any post-processing.

Using events from GHArchive, I have tried to estimate the number of modifications on comments and pull requests (pushing new code on a PR) daily but couldn't find any IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent or PullRequestEvent with the action "edited" or "synchronize" from 2015 to 2025. So I have a few questions.

According to the GitHub api documentation, IssueCommentEvent and PullRequestReviewCommentEvent have an "action" property in the payload which has the value "edited" when a comment is edited. Also, PullRequestEvent has "action" property in the payload which can have several values, especially "edited" and "synchronize".

• Does the "edited" action represent the edition of comments ?
• Does the "synchronize" action represent the fact of pushing new code to a PR ?
• Did the specification for these events change ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards

[shawnHartsell]

@Axel-NCHO Thank you for your question! I'll route this to the internal team that owns the endpoint so they can answer directly