Claude still showing in Contributors list after removing it from Git history

[codeafridi]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Hey everyone,

I recently cleaned up the Git history of my repo to remove Claude's co author attribution and force pushed the changes. The weird part is that claude is still showing up in the contributors section on the repository homepage.

i have checked a few things:

• No claude co author trailers in the commit history.
• No claude author or committer references on the default branch.
• Contributors API doesnt list claude anymore.
• Insights → contributors also shows the correct list.
  Basically everything looks clean except the contributors section on the repo homepage.Its been more than 24 hours since the history rewrite and its still there.Has anyone faced something similar? Is there any way to refresh this listing or does github need to fix it on their end?

Repo: https://github.com/codeafridi/Crowsnest

Thanks in advance

screenshot for reference

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[100rootrain]

The sidebar list is cached separately and isn't recalculated after a force-push, which is why the API and Insights look right while the homepage doesn't. A very similar case was solved two days ago in #212340, and the workaround was confirmed there:

1. Create a temporary branch from main.
2. Settings → General → Default branch: switch it to the temporary branch.
3. Wait a couple of minutes, then switch it back to main.

The poster confirmed the Contributors list was recalculated right after and the removed account disappeared. A variant that many people have confirmed in #191565 is renaming main to something else and back.

One thing to fix first, though. Your history isn't fully clean yet. All 22 tags still point at the pre-rewrite commits (each one shows as "diverged" from the new main), and v0.12.0 still contains 7 commits from Nov 3 with Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>, e.g. 81f4482, 40db46f, 55823c4. Your other branches also point at the old history, but I didn't find any Claude commits on them.

I'm not sure whether the sidebar looks at tags, but if it does, the stale entry could come right back after the refresh. I'd move the tag onto the rewritten commit first:

git fetch --tags
git log -1 --format='%s%n%ad' 'v0.12.0^{commit}'          # the old tagged commit
git log main --format='%H %ad %s' | grep -F '<that subject>'   # its rewritten twin on main
git tag -a -f v0.12.0 <new-sha> -m "Crowsnest 0.12.0"
git push origin -f v0.12.0

v0.12.0 has a published Release, which will follow the moved tag, but its source archives will change. The older tags don't contain any Claude commits, so they don't matter for this, but they do still point at the pre-rewrite history.

After that, do the default-branch switch. If the entry is still there a day later, it needs GitHub to purge the cache. #204093 has several reports of this exact stale-sidebar case if you want to add yours.

[codeafridi]

thanks a ton. this worked