Ignore Merge Commits For Merge Request Acceptance

When working in gitlab merge commits are made any time a merge request is approved. These commits are created for the user that approved the merge request.

Imagine a scenario where you have 2 engineers working on a project. Engineer 1 creates a MR to master. Engineer 2 approves it, creating a merge commit on master. Engineer 1 now updates with master, pulling the new merge commit by Engineer 2, and starts work on a feature. They push this feature and create a merge request to develop. This work now contains the feature commits by Engineer 1 and the merge commit from Engineer 2. Neither engineer will be able approve the merge request created for develop since both are on the commit history.

Possible solutions:

1. Create a system user that is used for all gitlab merges done to code that references the user that executed it in the commit message.
2. Ignore merge commits for purposes of determining authorization to approve a merge request.
3. Add a setting for a regex expression to match commit messages and ignore them when determining authorization to approve a merge request.