Pair Extraordinaire

Summary

Status: Earnable
Tiered: Yes
Evidence status: GitHub’s live achievement fragment officially states the broad trigger: coauthored commits on merged pull requests. Numerical tier thresholds and rewrite edge cases remain community-reported.

Pair Extraordinaire recognises genuine collaboration recorded through co-authored commits that are incorporated into merged pull requests.

Trigger

GitHub’s live detail fragment states that Pair Extraordinaire recognises coauthored commits on merged pull requests.

A visible Co-authored-by: trailer proves commit attribution. Two independent GitHub-linked events now show that squash merging can preserve Pair Extraordinaire attribution when the final commit retains the account-linked trailer. Rebase, stripped-trailer, email-matching, later rewrite, and exact counting behavior remain separate limitations.

Community-reported progression

Level	Reported qualifying merged pull requests	Evidence classification
Base	1	Community-reported
Bronze	10	Community-reported
Silver	24	Community-reported
Gold	48	Community-reported

These values have broad community support but should not be described as official GitHub thresholds.

Eligibility conditions

For GitHub to associate a co-authored commit with the intended account:

• the commit message must contain a correctly formatted Co-authored-by: Name <email> trailer;
• there must be a blank line between the main commit message and the trailer;
• the email must be associated with the co-author’s GitHub account, or be that account’s GitHub-provided no-reply address;
• each co-author must have a separate trailer line;
• the commit must be pushed to GitHub and remain in the merged pull request history;
• the attribution must represent a real contribution.

The treatment of private repositories, squash merges, rebases, rewritten commit messages, and unusual merge strategies is not comprehensively documented by GitHub.

Award timing

Achievement processing is not guaranteed to be immediate. A correctly attributed merged contribution may appear on the profile before the achievement badge or tier updates.

No official maximum processing time is published. Allow a reasonable delay before treating a missing badge as evidence of failure.

Verification

1. Open the merged pull request.
2. Open the relevant commit from the pull request timeline or commit list.
3. Confirm GitHub displays the expected co-author attribution.
4. Confirm the pull request is merged rather than merely closed.
5. Check the contributor’s public profile achievement section after processing time has elapsed.
6. Record the pull-request URL, merge date, and visible attribution when collecting reproducible evidence.

Do not publish private repository names, private commit content, personal email addresses, or other sensitive information as evidence.

Evidence status

• Official: GitHub supports Co-authored-by: commit trailers and requires an account-associated email for the commit to count as a contribution.
• Confirmed: Correctly formatted co-author trailers are displayed on GitHub after the commit is pushed.
• Official: GitHub’s live product fragment states that the achievement recognises coauthored commits on merged pull requests.
• Community-reported: The thresholds are 1, 10, 24, and 48 qualifying merged pull requests.
• Observed: Two independent squash merges retained account-linked trailers in their final commits and appear in GitHub’s Pair Extraordinaire history.
• Unknown: Rebase or fast-forward behavior, stripped trailers, email mismatch, later rewritten history, private repositories, exact unit counting, and delayed processing.

Known limitations and edge cases

• A trailer using an unassociated email may display as text without linking to the intended account.
• Squash merging can preserve attribution when the final commit retains the linked trailer, but settings or edits that strip the trailer can still remove it.
• Attribution added only to a pull-request description or comment does not create a co-authored commit.
• A co-authored commit on an unmerged branch does not satisfy the commonly reported merged-pull-request condition.
• GitHub may process contribution attribution and achievement progression on different schedules.
• Repository visibility and profile privacy settings can make public verification incomplete.
• Multiple co-authored commits in one pull request should not automatically be assumed to represent multiple qualifying units; community evidence generally describes progression by merged pull requests.

Troubleshooting

When an expected badge or tier does not appear:

1. Confirm the pull request shows a merged state.
2. Inspect the final commit history rather than the pre-merge branch history.
3. Verify the trailer uses the exact Co-authored-by: syntax.
4. Check for the required blank line before the trailer.
5. Confirm the email belongs to the intended GitHub account or uses its valid no-reply format.
6. Check whether squash merging or rebasing replaced the attributed commit.
7. Confirm the co-author is visibly linked on GitHub.
8. Allow additional processing time.
9. Treat the event as an observation until independently reproduced.

Responsible participation

Use co-author attribution only when another person made a substantive contribution to the commit. Accurate authorship is part of the permanent project record and should take priority over profile recognition.

History

GitHub has long supported multiple-author attribution through commit-message trailers. Pair Extraordinaire later exposed this form of collaboration as a profile achievement. GitHub has not published a complete public change log for the achievement’s thresholds or counting logic.

Material changes should therefore be documented with dated, reproducible evidence and should retain earlier claims until contradictions are resolved.

References

• Creating a commit with multiple authors
• Viewing contributions on your profile
• GitHub achievement index
• Public reconstruction corpus
• Official achievement fragment corpus

Last verified

20 July 2026 — verified GitHub’s first-party Pair Extraordinaire fragments plus two independent linked squash-merge histories. The broad trigger is official and squash preservation is observed; numerical thresholds and remaining rewrite states stay community-reported or unknown.

Back to the achievement index