Hi,
I extended our gerrit installation to support "forge author" safely. Forge author is the capability to push changes with an author field different from your own. This is useful when sending patches you've got from someone else while preserving attribution.
One downside of this capability, due to which we disabled it for a while, is that it's possible for a change to go through gerrit without the original author noticing. Maybe the author had issues with the change because it was still unfinished - but good enough for others. This is what happened for us.
So we now have a new column in gerrit, "AMR" for "Author-Must-Review" that's active if a change is sent with different author and committer fields. Under the new policy, the original author must review the change positively (meaning +1 or +2) before submission is allowed. Of course, the usual rules (Verified +1, Code-Review +2) still apply.
There is one notable exception: Since there are some large upstreaming efforts every now and then (mostly by Google), this rule is inconvenient and counter-productive there. We can assume that within such groups, people allow their "designated upstreamer" to push changes for them.
Because of this, the feature allows to add teams, where people can publish changes for each others without the new requirement. If you have such needs, please tell me about your team and I'll set it up.
This is in testing mode - if you find any weird behaviour or you run into walls because of this change, please tell me.
If that model doesn't work out, we'll revert it. But for now, these are the rules.
Regards, Patrick