Stale contributor shown after repository history rewrite

[Elnathz]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Repository:
https://github.com/Elnathz/speech-emotion-recognition

The repository contributor sidebar still shows @claude, although the
default branch no longer contains any commits authored or committed by
that account.

The history was rewritten and pushed on September 16, 2026. More than
24 hours have passed.

Current REST API evidence:

1. Contributors endpoint returns only Elnathz and MapleKaedee:
   https://api.github.com/repos/Elnathz/speech-emotion-recognition/contributors?anon=1&per_page=100

2. Commits attributed to claude returns an empty array:
   https://api.github.com/repos/Elnathz/speech-emotion-recognition/commits?author=claude&per_page=100

3. Local git history contains no Claude author, committer, or
   Co-authored-by trailer.

The repository ID shown by GitHub is 1329383830.

Could GitHub rebuild or invalidate the repository contributor sidebar
cache/index?

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[jarnix]

Same situation here this week. The checks you ran (contributors endpoint, commits by author, local git log) all look at commit authors; the sidebar is a cached list that also counts Co-authored-by trailers, so it can lag even when every author-based view is clean.

One thing not on your list: GitHub keeps refs/pull/N/head for every pull request, merged or closed, so old trailer commits survive there if they went through a PR. git ls-remote origin "refs/pull/*" shows them; fetch and grep for the trailer. If nothing is left anywhere, the documented way to have cached views purged is a GitHub Support ticket citing the "Removing sensitive data from a repository" page, which says exactly that cached views and PR references are only removable by Support. Switching the default branch away and back is the workaround people report in the meantime.