Why contributions and contributors look wrong 🟩

[queenofcorgis]

Your profile contributions graph is a record of contributions you've made to repositories on GitHub. They can reveal a lot of information at a quick glance, and it is understandable you’d want them to be accurate, up to date, and consistent.

This guide will help you diagnose common causes of inconsistencies with contributions and take the steps to fix it.

Quick Fix – Start Here

What looks wrong	Why that is	How to fix
A contributor/contribution is missing	- Commit was made less than 24 hours ago - Your local Git commit email isn’t connected to a GitHub account - Commit was not made in the default or gh-pages branch - Commit was made in a fork	- Wait 24 hours for the commit to appear - Check the email address used for a commit by adding .patch to the end of a commit URL   - Use this doc to add the correct email to your GH account - Open a PR to have your changes merged to the proper branch or change the default branch of the repository - Open a PR to have your changes merged into the parent repository
A removed person or bot still appears	- GitHub tracks commit history, not current contributors. - Removing repository access does not remove historical contribution attribution.	- Removing attribution requires changing the commits that contain it, not merely removing repository access. History rewrites change commit hashes and can disrupt collaborators, branches, pull requests, and forks.
Repository activity appears delayed or incorrect	- Github’s activity graph operates on UTC	- Check the time in UTC, contributions may appear the next day - Hard browser refresh:   - Windows/Linux: Ctrl + F5 or Ctrl + Shift + R   - Mac: Cmd + Shift + R   - This clears cached page data
Different GitHub views show different results	- Differences are expected because repository activity, contributor statistics, commit history, and profile contributions use different eligibility rules.	- Compare the same branch and/or same time period - Account for excluded commits - Check dates, your Profile uses the author date while repository views use the commit date - Learn more in What’s under the hood about how these are measured

What’s under the hood

There are different views of profile and repository activity that show different metrics. They can often be conflicting because they are measured differently.

• Profile contribution graph: Personal contributions dependent on eligibility rules, these are measured by authored date
• Pulse: Top 15 committers to the default branch
• Insights → Contributors: Top 100 contributors to the repository who have qualifying commits on the default branch, this excludes merge and empty commits
• Repository Activity View: Pushes, merges, force pushes, and branch changes, associated with authenticated actors
• Commit history: Commits from the selected branch
• Insights → Commits: Non-merge commits from the past year

You will get different results in different views because each view has its own criteria for measurement.

Other scenarios

Here are some other situations you may find yourself in and how to solve them.

• Stale contributor after rewriting history: Refer to @khasky’s Gist on how removing a stale contributor
• AI tool, bot, or GitHub App shown as a contributor: Check out this comment in the community from @jannoguer
• Private contributions not displayed publicly: Make sure the visibility of your private contributions is enabled, refer to the doc to learn how

Wrong Contribution/Contributor Checklist

• Confirm the commit is on the default or eligible branch
• Verify commit author email and account association
• Check repository visibility and contribution settings
• Inspect the commit history rather than relying on the sidebar
• Allow for processing or cache delays ~24
• Confirm history rewrites were pushed successfully

What can you change about contributions and contributors?

What you can change:

• Change author information in existing commits by rewriting history: Changes the Git commit objects and their attribution. Rewriting creates new commit hashes and requires a force-push.
• Add Co-authored-by trailers to new or rewritten commits: Gives multiple people authorship credit when the trailer uses an email connected to each person’s GitHub account. Existing commits must be rewritten to add the trailer retroactively. View our docs to learn how.
• Change private-contribution visibility: Controls whether private activity counts appear publicly on a user’s profile; it does not change the underlying repository history.

What you can’t change ❌

• Adding, removing, renaming, or reordering someone in the calculated contributors graph: It shows up to the top 100 contributors, excludes merge and empty commits, and derives the result from qualifying commits.
• Historical contributions: Removing repository access or blocking someone does not remove historical contribution attribution.

The best place to go for help, by situation

Situation	Best destination
General attribution question	Documentation or Community – search the posts first to see if someone has already asked
Configuration or Git history help	Community
Data remains inconsistent after 24 hours or more	Support
Sensitive personal information appears in commit history	Removing sensitive data from a repository - GitHub Docs

What to include when asking for help

• Repository URL and affected username
• Exact GitHub views that disagree
• Example commit SHAs
• Whether history was rewritten
• When the change occurred
• Screenshots with sensitive information removed

We hope you can navigate your contributions more easily now, make sure to bookmark this so next time there is a confusing contribution you can self-solve :check:.

[queenofcorgis]

Our available AI tools look at a variety of source materials to help answer customer questions including verified answers. By verifying this discussion, it shows up in those materials and is cited to help our users ❤️ .

[minhqdao]

Renaming the default branch and then renaming it back made the contributor list update for me. I had already tried pretty much everything else.

[DragosMocrii]

Renaming the default branch and then renaming it back made the contributor list update for me. I had already tried pretty much everything else.

Thanks, this worked!

[queenofcorgis]

Thanks for sharing this @minhqdao and I'm glad it worked for you @DragosMocrii ❤️