Contributors sidebar still shows a removed contributor after a history rewrite — how to get it refreshed?

[will-iam08]

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Question

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Hi, I'm looking for help with a stale Contributors sidebar on my repo: https://github.com/will-iam08/internship-notebook

On November 5, 2026, I rewrote the history of both published branches to remove Claude author and co-author attribution, and pushed the updated history the same day. As of November 8, the repository homepage still shows @claude as a third contributor, even though the current published history, the contributors API, and contributor statistics no longer include that account.

What I verified on November 8:

• No Claude or Anthropic matches in author, committer, or Co-Authored-By metadata across the fetched published branches.
• GET /repos/will-iam08/internship-notebook/contributors returns only will-iam08 (60) and github-actions[bot] (42).
• GET /repos/will-iam08/internship-notebook/stats/contributors returns only those two accounts.
• The Contributors insights page also shows only those two accounts.
• Reloading the repository homepage still shows will-iam08, github-actions[bot], and claude.

Current published heads:

• main: bc02d899744861d2ba2b0ee9fcd5c38e503548aa
• notebook-app-redesign: 07dba0699b8e0c5821f803cbb766507ca4279f64

I opened a support ticket (4973850), but it was closed — the support resources available to my account are self-service only. The contributor docs say to contact Support when the display stays stale after about 24 hours, and it's been more than 24 hours since the rewrite.

Is there a way to get the homepage contributor display recalculated to match the current history? The code and commit contents should stay unchanged — this is only about the display.

Thanks!

[g4lb]

The API is clean, so only the sidebar cache is old. In #212367, this removed @claude: rename the default branch, open the repo page, then rename it back.

[100rootrain]

I checked from the outside, and the sidebar is still stale as of Nov 10. The fragment the homepage loads for the Contributors box still includes @claude:

curl -s "https://github.com/will-iam08/internship-notebook/contributors_list?count=10&current_repository=internship-notebook&items_to_show=10" | grep -o 'alt="@[^"]*"'

Meanwhile GET /repos/will-iam08/internship-notebook/contributors returns only will-iam08 and github-actions[bot].

One useful data point: main has already moved since the rewrite (github-actions[bot] pushed 496d1b3 on Nov 9, 23:00 UTC), and the sidebar didn't change. So new pushes to the default branch don't rebuild this cache, and waiting longer probably won't help.

The default-branch rename from #212367 is the workaround that has worked for others:

1. Settings → General → Default branch → rename main to something temporary (e.g. main-tmp).
2. Open the repository homepage once. The Contributors box should now show only the two accounts.
3. Rename it back to main.

Renaming keeps all commits, PRs and settings. One caution: your "Refresh internship listings" workflow pushes to main on a schedule. Do the rename between runs. If the workflow pushes while the branch is renamed, it could create a new main branch and the rename back would fail.

If the box is still wrong after that, only GitHub staff can rebuild it, so it's worth keeping this thread open.