Stale contributor still displayed in repository homepage sidebar

[yuu7708]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Hello GitHub Community,

I am experiencing an issue where an unwanted account (caterina1974) is still displayed in the Contributors section on the homepage of my repositories.

I have checked the complete Git commit history, all remote branches, and tags. The reachable commits show only my account (yuu7708) as the author.

Additionally, the Insights → Contributors page shows only my account, but the Contributors section on the repository homepage still displays the unwanted account.

Affected repositories:

1. https://github.com/yuu7708/Mission2-Animal-Quiz
2. https://github.com/yuu7708/Mission3-Mini-NPU

Could you please investigate whether the homepage contributor list is stale and explain how to refresh or correct it?

I have already contacted GitHub Support, but my ticket (#4986477) was closed with a recommendation to use self-service resources.

Thank you for your help.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[100rootrain]

I checked both repos, and I can see where the entry comes from. You're right that the homepage list is stale.

Both repos had a force push today that replaced commits authored and committed as caterina1974:

Repo	Commits replaced by the force push	Force push (UTC)
Mission2-Animal-Quiz	0b287562, 8329db25	Nov 11, 03:19
Mission3-Mini-NPU	2cdcaa2f, a8913315 (including the root commit)	Nov 11, 04:55

Those commits are no longer on any branch, there are no tags, and there are no pull requests. So the API (/contributors) and Insights are correct. The homepage sidebar is cached separately, though, and it isn't recalculated after a force push. That's why it still counts the old commits.

How to refresh it: switch the default branch away and back. This worked for the same situation in #212504 and #212340:

1. Settings → General → Default branch: switch to another branch.
   • Mission2-Animal-Quiz: you can use feature/quiz-improvement. It only contains your own commits.
   • Mission3-Mini-NPU: only has main, so create a temporary branch first (git push origin main:tmp).
2. Open the repository homepage once, wait a couple of minutes, then switch the default branch back to main.
3. Delete the temporary branch.

Renaming main to something else and back also works (#191565). If the entry is still there a day later, only GitHub can purge the cache. #204093 collects reports of this exact problem, so you could add yours there.

To stop it from happening again: the replaced commits were made with a Git identity that belongs to the other account. This usually happens on a shared or lab computer. On the machine you used, run:

git config --show-origin user.name
git config --show-origin user.email

If they show the other person's details, set your own, either globally or just in the repo:

git config --global user.name "yuu7708"
git config --global user.email "<an email that's verified on your account>"

One more thing I noticed: the last three commits on Mission2's main (d08c47e0, da42e531, 7e73ac4a) use an email that isn't linked to any GitHub account. The API lists them as anonymous, so they don't count toward your contribution graph. If that address is yours, add and verify it under Settings → Emails, and they'll be attributed to you.

[kittimzhe]

Live-checked both repositories just now, and the result isolates the problem precisely:

• Mission2-Animal-Quiz — contributors API returns only you (two entries, both resolving to yuu7708: 19 + 3)
• Mission3-Mini-NPU — contributors API returns only you (5)

caterina1974 does not appear in the live API data at all. The ghost exists only in the homepage sidebar — which is the stale-snapshot variant of this family (#211425, #211765): the sidebar recomputes lazily and history cleanups don't trigger it, so it keeps rendering a pre-cleanup snapshot while every API view is already correct.

The fix that has worked repeatedly in this family: push any new commit to each repository — that's the usual trigger for the sidebar to recompute, and it drops to the real count within a day or so. No history work needed; your git side is already clean.