[capableweb]

"force" is harmful not only because you might push over other people's changes, but because you're also introducing additional work for people who are using the branch you're force pushing to. No longer can those people simply run `git pull` to get a updated branch, since older references also changed.

Solution is simply to never use force. Let the history be the history, don't overwrite it.

[mic47]

But for wast majority of pull request branches, people are not checking them out. And if so, they are not modifying it, so dropping local branch and checking fresh one is 20s additional work.

Additionally, technically speaking --force does not overwrite history, it just moves the branch pointer. Old commits are there.

[tome]

If they checkout `origin/branchname` rather than just `branchname` then `branchname` doesn't get created locally so they don't even have to drop the old one!