Public contribution check confirms correct attribution, but graph still undercounts commits (2026-10-20)

[lavochkaa]

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Question

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Repository: lavochkaa/DesktopPet (public, default branch main)

On 2026-10-20 (UTC) I made 9 commits to the default branch, all with the
same author/committer email, verified via the API as correctly attributed
to my account (author.login: lavochkaa on every single one). I also ran
GitHub's own "Run a public contribution check" virtual assistant on one of
them, and it confirmed: "That contribution looks as though it's attributed
to you."

Despite that, the "Contribution activity" summary for that date shows only
1 commit for this repository, not 9.

Commits in question (all verified via GET /repos/lavochkaa/DesktopPet/commits/{sha}):

9fd41a4380866844778845beabcc909c4d5cded4 2026-10-20T16:58:15Z
63f8f564d0b445ff6cbadce1c9a0fcd25f8663d0 2026-10-20T16:59:04Z
b55ad8ed20449974afe285ae4b4615bdf17545a2 2026-10-20T18:22:16Z
5dfc9055cb85f061a00ed2217f03406df670ee18 2026-10-20T18:23:13Z
a71e3df3a35ea35a48aed6aed5463ad4f7cd70ca 2026-10-20T18:25:02Z
f511286c201d9e33cab4fb4e0bbcd0de7841a1f6 2026-10-20T18:26:21Z
aa6bf94332f547db5d9c049e24fb29ac8db782d4 2026-10-20T18:30:13Z
c5e87174e071deae8b933bec3bdf11e1231e03fc 2026-10-20T18:33:25Z
6d7297a6bdf18a2f2f7cb93b70da832dbf429e5e 2026-10-20T18:40:48Z

All of them are on main and reachable in the repo's current history.
Several of them are only 1-3 minutes apart — wondering if that's related
(some anti-automation heuristic on closely-spaced commits?).

Any insight into why only 1 out of 9 correctly-attributed commits counted
toward that day's contributions?

[ronitgupta138]

This usually boils down to two things:

1. Timezone offsets: Your Git author date in git log might say Oct 20th in your local time, but the contribution calendar plots commits strictly against UTC. Commits made late at night often land on the next day's square.
2. Contribution cache delay: GitHub processes graph updates in asynchronous batches. If the commits were pushed during peak hours, it can take up to 24 hours for the calendar cache to sync with git history. Check git log -1 --format='%ai | %ci' to see the exact UTC timestamp.

[lavochkaa]

Hello, thanks for your comment.

Before opening this pull request, I consulted the GitHub documentation.

You are correct—some commits might end up being attributed to the previous day due to time zone differences; this can be resolved by setting the correct time zone (which I have done).

I’d like to offer a small correction: the cache updates within a very short timeframe—the GitHub documentation mentions a 24-hour limit.

I have completed all the steps mentioned above, yet the commits still haven’t appeared, even after 24 hours. Only 4 commits from the last 2 days are showing up, even though there are 9 in total. New commits appear, but the older ones do not.

I now explicitly include -u origin main with every push and ensure an interval of at least one minute between them, so such issues no longer occur.

I have three theories regarding this:

1. Time formatting: It is likely that their calculation logic uses a YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM format, excluding seconds.
2. GitHub may have flagged some of my commits as suspicious and excluded them from the contribution graph.
3. It could simply be a system error; I’ve noticed many other users complaining about this, so it’s quite possibly a platform-side issue.

[ronitgupta138]

Your 3rd theory is actually spot on — it's an ongoing platform-side issue.

GitHub has an active incident thread tracking this exact problem:
Discussion #203416: Profile rendering issues affecting GitHub profiles:

"We've received multiple reports about profile pages rendering differently than expected, including... contribution graphs not accurately reflecting commits."

And earlier today, GitHub posted an operational incident on githubstatus.com (Incident nms1dpzmh9d9) noting background delivery and ingestion delays across platform events.

GitHub does not penalize or throttle commits for being 1–2 minutes apart, nor does it drop seconds from timestamps. When the contribution ingestion queue is backlogged, the background worker processes the push batch but occasionally drops event triggers for intermediate commits in quick succession, only recording the head commit of the push.

Once the team runs the background event reconciliation/backfill, those missing intermediate commits should retroactively appear on your graph. No need to artificially wait between pushes or add extra flags!

[lavochkaa]

Thank you for your response.

I’m trying to gradually get familiar with the GitHub ecosystem, so I’m not yet familiar with most of it. I did try to look for information on my own and came across some similar discussions, but since everything looks fine on the status checker, I decided to reach out here.