Historical contributions missing after verified email transfer: expected rebuild behavior?

[gelatoni-xh]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Profile

Body

My account is gelatoni-xh. On the afternoon of October 31, 2026 (UTC+8), I finished adding and verifying the email used by my older commits on this account after moving it from another account. More than two days later, many historical contributions are still missing, although commit authors now correctly resolve to my current account and new contributions are being counted.

I checked the following:

• The exact historical author email is listed as verified on my current account. I am omitting the email itself from this public report.
• The affected public repositories are owned by this account, are not forks, and use main as their default branch.
• The commits are reachable from main, and the REST commit API resolves their author.login to gelatoni-xh.
• I checked both the public contribution calendar and the GraphQL contribution collection, so this does not appear to be a local browser display issue.

One public example: tasuki-keifu commit 06b1a737. Its author and committer timestamps are both 2026-08-18T16:32:23Z; neither August 18 nor August 19 currently shows contributions on my public calendar. The repository has 115 commits dated in 2026 on its default branch, but GraphQL currently reports only one commit contribution for it, from a new November commit. I recognize that raw history counts are not by themselves a guarantee of contribution eligibility.

A controlled refresh test did not restore history: I pushed one empty commit to the default branch of my profile repository on November 2 (UTC). That commit is now counted, but the previous 11 commits in the same repository are still absent from its 2026 commit contribution count. I have not yet waited a full 24 hours after that test; the email association itself has been in place for more than two days. Some other commits using the same historical email are already counted, so the email is not uniformly unrecognized.

I understand the Community cannot access or repair individual account data, and I am not asking to escalate a Support ticket. I am asking about documented product behavior and safe diagnostic steps. I have not rewritten history or repeatedly removed/re-added the email.

This seems similar to discussion #211738. Is there an officially supported way to request or trigger a historical contribution rebuild after an email transfer, once author attribution is correct but the contribution calendar remains incomplete? Is there any additional diagnostic evidence that would distinguish an expected delay from incomplete re-indexing?

I would appreciate guidance that preserves existing commit history. Thank you.

Submission note: My previous post (#211894) was automatically closed because I created it through the API. I am resubmitting through this category’s web template as requested.

[gelatoni-xh]

Clarification of scope: this issue affects both public and private repositories. My goal is to restore all eligible historical commit contributions across my account, with private contributions shown only as anonymized counts. I do not want to make private repositories or their contents public.

The “Private contributions” display option was already enabled during the earlier investigation. That investigation also found historical commits in private, non-fork repositories on their default branches whose authors resolve to my current account, while only a subset appeared in the contribution data. The public commits above are reproducible examples, not the full scope of the issue.

I understand that not every raw Git commit necessarily qualifies for the contribution graph. My question is whether the historical contribution rebuild after transferring a verified author email should cover both public and private eligible contributions, and whether there are additional documented checks specific to private contributions. I am not requesting disclosure of private repository details or escalation of my Support ticket.

[gelatoni-xh]

Update: my historical contributions have now been restored. I rechecked the default-branch history against the contribution counts for the affected public and private repositories, and the totals for commits using my verified emails now match. Anonymized private contributions are also visible after enabling the profile display setting. I cannot determine which process triggered the rebuild, so I am not attributing the recovery to the empty-commit test or this discussion. Thank you; I am closing this discussion as resolved.

[gelatoni-xh]

Follow-up: I have now been able to read the latest Support reply. GitHub Support explicitly confirmed that they rebuilt my contribution data and marked the ticket solved. This provides confirmation of a Support-side rebuild; the empty-commit test should not be treated as the demonstrated fix. My verification above still stands: the affected public and private historical contribution totals now match.