Stale contributor remains in repository sidebar after history rewrite

[randian-2008]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Stale contributor remains in repository sidebar after history rewrite

Repository:
https://github.com/randian-2008/bilibili-music-player

I rewrote the repository history and force-pushed all branches and tags to
remove an unintended Co-authored-by trailer.

The current state has been verified:

• No reachable commit, branch, or tag contains the removed co-author.
• The contributors graph data returns only randian-2008 with 33 commits.
• However, the repository homepage sidebar endpoint still reports two
  contributors and incorrectly includes claude.

Stale sidebar endpoint:

https://github.com/randian-2008/bilibili-music-player/contributors_list?current_repository=bilibili-music-player&deferred=true

Could GitHub staff please invalidate or rebuild the repository homepage
contributors sidebar cache?

Thank you.

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[hoangperry]

Your cleanup actually worked everywhere except that one cached page fragment — I checked from the outside:

• The REST contributors API (/repos/randian-2008/bilibili-music-player/contributors) already returns only randian-2008 (33 commits).
• A commit search filtered by the removed author returns 0 reachable commits.
• There are no refs/pull/* refs keeping the old commits alive (those can sometimes pin rewritten history, but not here).

So the data layer is clean; the only stale piece is the contributors_list homepage fragment, which is a separately cached, lazily rebuilt UI component. There's unfortunately no user-facing action that forces it — pushes, renames, and settings toggles don't invalidate it, and it can lag the real data by days or even weeks while unreachable objects wait for server-side maintenance.

Two realistic options:

1. Wait it out — it does converge on its own after the backend recomputes.
2. Support ticket at https://support.github.com/contact — cache/index resets for a specific repo are account-specific actions, and GitHub staff have said in this forum that those requests need to go through Support rather than the community (staff can trigger the rebuild).

Given you've already verified the graph data is correct, a ticket with exactly the evidence you posted here should be quick to action.

[randian-2008]

Update:

I contacted GitHub Support as suggested, but the ticket was automatically
closed because my current account only has access to self-service resources.
I was redirected back to GitHub Community Discussions.

The repository data remains clean:

• The REST contributors API returns only randian-2008.
• The contributors graph is correct.
• No reachable commit, branch, tag, or pull ref contains the removed co-author.
• Only the homepage contributors_list fragment still shows claude.

Since there appears to be no user-facing cache invalidation mechanism and
Support is unavailable for my account, could a GitHub staff member please
review or forward this stale sidebar cache issue?

Thank you.