I would like to remove 7/8 commits from around two years ago from my GitHub repository. Only 2/3 of the commits touch any code, the rest were just adding and removing the config files.
Some previous developers uploaded and removed literally > 650 duplicate config files, and it is messing up our github stat page. Stat Graph
We've tried removing them with git rebase -i, but it took 6 hours and most parts of the code were gone.
How do we remove these ancient commits without messing up other commit history? We're currently recoding all code on the repository, so it is not a big deal if the changes from those individual commits aren't kept, but we'd like to keep all the statistics that went along with the old code besides this.