The "Prevent changes without a pull request" branch permission in stash 3.10 doesn't stop an initial commit to a matching branch. To reproduce:

• Create a pattern restriction on refs/heads/release/** with the "Prevent changes without a pull request" checkbox checked
• git clone http://admin@localhost:7990/stash/scm/project_1/rep_1.git
• cd rep_1
• git checkout -b release/1.2.3
• echo "TEST" > README
• git add README; git commit -m TEST README
• git push (this succeeds, but should fail)
• echo "TEST2" >> README; git commit -m TEST2 README
• git push (this fails, as expected)

I'm not sure if this is intentional - the branch has to be created somehow in order to do the pull request, but allowing brand new commits as part of the creation seems wrong.