Hi,
My team is on the free tier; I know that requiring approval is not available on the free tier but up until recently we still had the ability to approve merge requests.
It seems like recently that went away from the UI [again in the free tier]. Is this part of a planned UI cleanup, or a bug? Being able to approve the MR was part of our workflow, even if it wasn’t enforced we’re still a small team so it’s easy enough to audit.
–JP
We’ve noticed the same issue 
+1 for this issue, also on the free tier. The only thing showing right now is the thumbs up/down button.
@jp1 @andrew.longstaffe @justin.lang Unfortunately, the approval button on merge requests displaying for users on the Free plan of GitLab.com and Core for self-managed was a bug that’s been present since 11.0. This was reported in this issue and the fix was included in 11.9. Overall, merge request approvals is a feature only available in Bronze for GitLab.com, Starter for self-managed, and above.
We have a new feature proposal issue open that discusses getting the approval button added back to GitLab CE for certain roles. Please feel free to give that issue a thumbs up, follow it, and add any comments.
The “bug” (as you describe it) has been around since at least 10.X (at least on Core) as we’ve been using it ever since we adopted Gitlab*, and thus also always assumed that the optional approvals had always been part of the Core package (which also makes sense imho).
This getting removed after at least 1.5years of availability to free users feels like it completely contradicts the “We’ll always move features down” section of your pricing handbook.
* With my current employer, I’m actually quite confident this was the case even earlier, but we upgraded to Starter quite early on when I convinced moving my old employer to GL so I’m not 100% sure it was pre-10.0.
@jonas1 Thanks for the feedback. I think our team would greatly appreciate your input on the feature proposal issue I previously linked as well if you feel like providing it. My statement of this existing since 11.0 came from one of our backend developers but it sounds probable that it existed before that as well based on your comment.