How to Remove Commit References from PRs

[isHarryh]

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I recently encountered an issue where a commit that referenced a PR was deleted via force-push, but the reference still appears in the PR's activity feed (the message "someone pushed a commit that referenced this pull request" remains visible in the PR timeline).

To reproduce:

1. Created a commit that included a reference to the PR using the #PR-number syntax.
2. Later realized the commit was unnecessary and removed it using git rebase -i.
3. Force-pushed the updated branch to GitHub.

Despite these steps, the reference to the deleted commit still appears in the pull request's activity.

I understand that GitHub retains references to old commits for a certain period, but I would like to know:

Is there a way to remove this specific reference from the PR timeline? Or, is there a method to:

• Manually remove or hide the reference to the deleted commit in the PR's activity?
• Trigger GitHub's garbage collection to expedite the removal of such references?

Any guidance on how to handle this situation would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

PS1: I know how to remove sensitive data from GitHub. So the "commits" I mentioned above are all non-sensitive commits.

PS2: Just like "Pull Requests", if the above things happened in "Issues", the reference to the commit will also remain.