Sidebar Contributors widget still lists a removed contributor 14 days after history rewrite (Insights graph is correct)

[dkmkelley]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Repository: https://github.com/dkmkelley/community-riggers
Current HEAD: 56660a76610df06fa089d3d2b597f38d3db603d4

What happened
On September 14, 2026, I rewrote history (interactive rebase) and force pushed to main to remove a Co-Authored-By trailer from one commit message. That trailer had caused a second contributor, "claude", to appear in the Contributors list.

What I verified

• The old commit no longer exists on the remote. git ls-remote origin shows only refs/heads/main, with no other branches, tags, or pull request refs.
• In a fresh clone, git log --all shows no commit message, author, or committer that references that contributor.
• git shortlog -sne --all shows only dkmkelley and Donovan Kelley (both dkmkelley@gmail.com). The one committer that is not me is GitHub noreply@github.com.

What is still wrong

• The Contributors section in the sidebar on the repository home page still lists the removed contributor.
• The Insights > Contributors graph is correct and does not list them. Only the sidebar widget is stale.
• It still shows in a logged-out incognito window, so it is not a browser cache issue.
• I have pushed new commits since (the latest was September 27), and an empty commit push did not refresh it either.

Expected: the sidebar Contributors widget matches the current commit history and the Insights graph.
Actual: the sidebar still shows the contributor from the deleted commit, 14 days after the rewrite.

I opened a support ticket and was redirected to the community forum. Has anyone seen the sidebar cache get stuck like this, and is there a way to get it recomputed? A GitHub staff member who can trigger a refresh of the repository's contributor stats would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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[zixunn]

I also met a similar problem, and I tried the following method; it works.

Go to Settings -> General -> Default branch
Switch the default branch to another branch, Update, and confirm.
Again, switch back to the original branch, Update, and confirm.
Wait a few minutes and reload the repo page.

[dkmkelley]

what if i only have one branch in my repo?

EDIT: nevermind, i just created a temp branch, switched it to the default then switched the default back to main AND IT WORKED!

Thank you so much 🙏🙏🙏