PR quality checks reject checked items using asterisk list markers

Mentorship
1

Hi everyone, I’m Prince, a new Django contributor.

While updating the description of my documentation PR, #21935, I encountered a confusing issue with the PR quality checks.

My description used * [x] for checked items. GitHub displayed the checkboxes as checked, but the quality checker still reported missing AI disclosure and an incomplete checklist. After replacing the asterisk markers with hyphens (- [x]), the check passed.

I found the “Bot checks for typo PRs” discussion, but didn’t see this particular formatting issue mentioned.

Is this restriction intentional, or should the checker accept asterisk markers too? If it’s a bug, is there an existing ticket, or would a new Trac ticket and a small patch with tests be appropriate?

Thank you!

2

This is worth a trac ticket. There’s an accessibility concern about using - instead of * for markdown lists too, but that’s a tangent. The fact that github renders it properly is likely sufficient justification for a change.

3

Thanks for the guidance! I’ve opened ticket #37346 with the reproduction steps and a link to this discussion. I’m interested in working on the fix and regression tests.