Incorrect/Stale Contributor Attribution Persists After Commit Removal

[ngocnxx]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

Body

I am seeking assistance with an issue involving the contributor information displayed for my GitHub repository.

I am the repository owner and the sole actual contributor to the project. During development, a commit was inadvertently attributed to Claude. I subsequently removed that commit from the repository history.

However, Claude is still displayed as a contributor on the repository's main page, despite there being no current commits attributed to Claude. When I examine the detailed contributor information and the repository's current commit history, Claude does not appear to have any commits. The repository therefore appears to have a discrepancy between its current commit history and the contributor attribution displayed on the repository homepage.

I would like to understand:

Why is Claude still being displayed as a contributor after the associated commit has been removed?
Is the contributor information generated from historical repository data that is not automatically recalculated after a commit is removed?
Is there a way for the contributor data to be recalculated or corrected so that the public contributor display accurately reflects the repository's current history?

This is particularly important because the repository is being used as part of an academic project. The continued display of Claude as a contributor could create a misleading impression about the authorship and development of the project, even though the current repository history shows that I am the sole contributor. I have already checked the repository's current commit history and confirmed that there are no commits attributed to Claude. I would therefore appreciate any guidance on how the stale contributor attribution can be removed or corrected.

I can provide the repository URL, screenshots of the contributor display, and relevant commit-history information if required.

[nisargpatel7042lva]

You're not imagining this, it's a known thing. GitHub's docs say contributor stats can take about a day to refresh after you rewrite history, and on top of that the homepage sidebar and the Insights → Contributors tab seem to pull from different caches, so it's pretty normal for one to update before the other. Seen a couple other people hit this exact "stale Claude in the sidebar" thing after cleaning up a Co-authored-by trailer too.

Two things that reportedly fixed it for others when just waiting didn't: push an empty commit (git commit --allow-empty -m "reindex" && git push), or go into Settings → Branches and flip your default branch to something else and back. Neither's an official fix, just stuff that's worked for people in the same spot. If it's still stuck after a couple days, GitHub Support is the actual documented next step for this one specifically.