Assign unless liquid tag vs jekyll-archives

Hey all,
here’s what I’m doing

{% assign author = site.authors | where: 'short_name', page.author | first %}
{% unless author.name  %}
    {% assign author = site.authors | where: 'short_name',  'paul' %}
{% endunless %}

alas not working in the jekyll-archives plugin (could be a plugin problem?) ( https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-archives)
Works everywhere else.

What I am trying to achieve is, assign a page author to the generated archives pages.

Any ideas?

looks like this is an issue with jekyll-archives that has never been fixed :frowning: