I have a weird situation with my GitHub repository. There’s someone named ‘sainish’ showing up as a contributor in my repo insights, but I have no idea who this person is or how they got there.
Here’s what’s strange about it:
My repo is public but I’m the only one with write access
There are no forks, pull requests, or issues from this user
When I check git log, I don’t see any commits from this person
GitHub settings confirm I’m the sole contributor with permissions
The insights page shows this user has 3 commits, but clicking on them displays nothing
This person doesn’t seem to be active on GitHub at all
I’ve already sent them a message asking about it but haven’t heard back. I work on this project from both a Windows desktop and Linux laptop, though both use the same GitHub account so I don’t think that’s related.
The repository was created completely from scratch without using any templates or existing code. Has anyone experienced something similar? What could cause a phantom contributor to appear in the insights without any visible commits or activity?
This phantom contributor issue can also occur if you’ve cloned or downloaded code from another repository at some point, even partially. Sometimes developers copy specific files or code snippets from other projects during development, and if those files contain commit history or were part of a git bundle, traces of the original contributors can leak into your repository’s metadata. Another possibility is that you initialized your repository in a directory that previously contained git artifacts from another project - even hidden .git folders that weren’t completely cleaned up. GitHub’s insights algorithm sometimes picks up on these remnants and attributes phantom commits. Try running git fsck --full to check for any repository corruption or orphaned objects that might be causing this attribution issue. You might also want to create a completely fresh repository and migrate your code there if the problem persists.
sounds like a shared machine issue tbh. if you got the laptop from work or bought it used, previous owner might have set up git globally. try git config --global --list to see whats configured - bet you’ll find sainish in there somewhere.
I encountered something similar when I inherited a work laptop from a colleague. The issue turned out to be repository-level git configuration overriding my global settings. Even though my global config was correct, there was a local .git/config file in the repository with the previous user’s credentials. You should check if there’s a local git configuration in your problematic repository by running git config --local --list from within the repo directory. If you see sainish’s details there, you can remove them with git config --local --unset user.name and git config --local --unset user.email. This would explain why the contributor appears in insights but you can’t see their actual commits - they’re technically your commits but attributed incorrectly due to the wrong local git identity being used when you made those commits.
This happened to me before and it was definitely a git configuration issue. When you set up git on a new machine or after a fresh install, sometimes the global user.name and user.email settings get mixed up or inherit values from previous users of that machine. Since you mentioned using both Windows and Linux machines, one of them probably has the wrong git identity configured. Run git config --global user.name and git config --global user.email on both systems to verify they match your GitHub account. The sainish user is likely showing up because commits were made with that name/email combination at some point, even though they’re actually your commits. GitHub’s contributor insights can be misleading when git identities don’t match properly.
yeah, that could be it. check the git configs on both machines to see if ‘sainish’ is in there. github tracks commits by the email and name used, so it’s possible that’s how they’re showing up. hope it helps!