Removed contributor still appears after 24 hours

[FouziaAhmedReya]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

I rewrote my repository history and removed all commits authored by SetulAlChowhan from the default main branch.

More than 24 hours have passed. When I filter the main branch commit history by this contributor, GitHub displays “No commits history.” However, SetulAlChowhan is still displayed in the repository’s Contributors section.

Repository URL:

Is it possible to refresh or rebuild the cached contributor statistics?

I have attached screenshots showing the contributor list and the empty filtered commit history.

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[lucaasporto]

I had the same issue. What worked for me was creating a new repository with the same content as the old one. This way, the contributor list starts from scratch, and the old co-author is no longer included.

It’s not exactly a solution for refreshing the existing repository’s Contributors widget, but it worked as a workaround in my case.

[lucaasporto]

@FouziaAhmedReya Did this help you? If so, please mark the topic as answered. Thanks!

[paul-saac]

Yeah, I ran into this too turns out GitHub's Contributors widget doesn't actually track "current state," it tracks commit history. So even if you remove a co-author line from future commits, GitHub still counts them because their name is baked into the old commits forever. Kind of a design flaw, honestly there's no clean "edit contributors" button anywhere.

The workaround that actually worked for me: instead of trying to fix the existing repo, just make a fresh repository and push the same content into it with clean, single-author commits. Since the Contributors widget builds itself from commit history, the new repo starts from zero — no stray co-author, no leftover names you don't want listed.

To be clear, this isn't fixing the original repo's widget GitHub doesn't let you retroactively edit that, and rewriting commit history (like with rebase or filter-branch) is messy and can break things for anyone else using the repo. So this is really a "start clean" move, not a "repair" move. But if you don't need to preserve the original repo's history or star count, it's honestly the easiest fix out there way less painful than fighting Git internals to strip a co-author tag after the fact.