Contributors sidebar and the /contributors API disagree after a history rewrite

[Pr1nted]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

I rewrote main on Pr1nted/Open-Doctrines to strip Co-authored-by trailers and force-pushed. The rewritten commits are unreachable from every ref now, but the co-author is still listed in the Contributors panel on the repository home page.

What makes this look like more than a stale cache is that GitHub's own surfaces disagree with each other:

Source	Says
GET /repos/Pr1nted/Open-Doctrines/contributors (incl. anon=1)	1 contributor
GET /repos/Pr1nted/Open-Doctrines/stats/contributors	1 contributor
/Pr1nted/Open-Doctrines/graphs/contributors-data	1 contributor
/Pr1nted/Open-Doctrines/_sidebar (what the home page renders)	contributorCount: 2

The first three recomputed after the force-push. _sidebar did not, and it is the one people actually see.

The two rewritten commits are still served, trailers intact, though nothing references them:

6fe09cc64c280fa04299fc32db6191beb42175d0
8aa0f8983dc9f22ab19e43dd9ff7bf3e5b32d59a

What I have already checked, so nobody has to ask:

• No Co-authored-by trailer survives on any ref. I mirror-fetched refs/heads/*, refs/tags/* and refs/pull/* into a bare clone and grepped every reachable commit: main, 12 tags and both PR head refs are clean.
• GET /repos/Pr1nted/Open-Doctrines/commits?author=<that account> returns nothing, and it is not a collaborator.
• The wiki is clean, and the one fork's own history predates the commits in question.

What I have tried:

• The force-push itself.
• An empty commit to main to prompt a recompute. No effect after several days.
• Cache-busting query strings on _sidebar. Same payload, so it is server-side rather than CDN.
• A support ticket, auto-closed by the triage bot on account tier before a human saw it.

Two questions:

1. Is the sidebar list derived from a stored (repository, user) contribution row written at push time, rather than recomputed from the default branch? If so, a rewrite would never clear it, and the several "just force-push and wait" answers already on this forum are wrong.
2. Has anyone actually got one of these cleared, and what worked? Short of deleting and recreating the repository, which costs stars, watchers and the fork link for a cosmetic row.

I have left the co-author's username out on purpose: it resolves to a real account that has never touched this project and does not need the traffic. Happy to pass it to anyone from GitHub who can act on it.

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[queenofcorgis]

Thank you for reporting this bug. We've been logging these posts and are currently investigating solutions. We will share updates as soon as work begins and we have a better sense of when it will ship.

In the meantime, we did publish a troubleshooting guide for folks who may have missing contributions if you haven't taken the steps outlined in this doc, I recommend doing those first.

We appreciate the patience!

[EthanSky2986]

I'm seeing the same homepage/API discrepancy on my repository: https://github.com/EthanSky2986/WireBench-2D.

An initial commit accidentally used a generic no-reply address that GitHub associated with an unrelated real account. I corrected the attribution on October 1, 2026 (Asia/Shanghai) and updated the published branches and release tags.

Rechecked on October 4:

• The fully loaded repository homepage still shows Contributors (2), including the unrelated account.
• GET /repos/EthanSky2986/WireBench-2D/contributors returns only EthanSky2986, with 10 contributions.
• The current main commit is 1f3cd67f25527e8d68b69212e7c7e292df786712; GitHub associates both its author and committer with my account. The locally fetched branch/tag histories contain no attribution to the unrelated account.
• Additional commits and publishing v0.2.0-alpha did not remove the sidebar entry.
• I also tried renaming the default branch to a temporary name and back to main, as suggested in discussion I want to remove Claude AI name from Contributor list #191565. The branch/tag SHAs were identical before and after; reloading the homepage still showed the entry.

One caveat: GitHub still advertises refs/pull/1/head and refs/pull/2/head. Those GitHub-managed PR refs were not rewritten, so I am not claiming that every server-side reference is clean.

I submitted a support ticket, but the response directed me to Community/self-service resources. Could this repository be included in the investigation, and is a refresh of the homepage contributor data available? I'm asking to correct accidental attribution, not remove anyone's legitimate work. Thank you.