Contributors widget on repo homepage still shows a removed co-author 5+ days after force-push

[spandrio]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Repo: https://github.com/spandrio/voltec

A few days ago I amended a commit on main to remove a Co-Authored-By: trailer, then force-pushed with --force-with-lease. Since then:

• git log --all on main shows no commit authored or co-authored by that account/email — history is clean.
• The /spandrio/voltec/graphs/contributors-data endpoint correctly returns a single contributor, matching the real history.
• The small "Contributors" widget on the repo's homepage (right sidebar) still shows 2 contributors, including the removed co-author. It's been over 2 days (past the ~24h window mentioned in the docs), and pushing a fresh empty commit today didn't clear it either — the commit count updated instantly, but the stale contributor stayed.

I opened a support ticket (#4768926) about this, but it was closed immediately since my account doesn't have a support plan that covers this — hence posting here instead.

Has anyone else run into a Contributors widget staying stale like this for multiple days after a force-push, even though the actual stats endpoint already recomputed correctly? Any known way to nudge it, or is this just a longer-tail cache that eventually clears on its own?
thank you for your time

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[jarnix]

Two things worth knowing, from doing the same cleanup this week.

First, /contributors-data and the REST contributors endpoint count commit authors, so they were never going to list the co-author; the fact that they are clean does not mean the sidebar's input is clean. The sidebar is a separate cached list that includes Co-authored-by credits.

Second, GitHub keeps the head of every pull request as refs/pull/N/head, merged or closed included, and the docs for rewritten history say old commits can remain reachable "through any pull requests that reference them" and "in cached views". If the amended commit was ever part of a PR, run

git ls-remote origin "refs/pull/*"

and fetch those refs to check for the trailer with git log --all --format=%B | grep -i co-authored-by. Since a normal commit already did not refresh the widget for you, the remaining documented option is a Support ticket asking them to remove the cached views (that is the exact wording in "Removing sensitive data from a repository"); the undocumented one people report is switching the default branch away and back.