Students Cannot Accept Assignments Any more

GitHub Classroom
#1

I have been using GitHub Classroom for about a year, without major problems, but suddenly the ability of students accepting assignments seems to be broken.

From late last week, students receive this message after accepting an assignment.

“There was an error accepting the assignment. We were not able to add the user to your assignment, please try again… If this problem persists, please contact support.”

After refreshing, the error remains unchanged. Sometimes, they get this error instead:

"Repository Deleted

You accepted the assignment, X, but the repository associated with this assignment has been deleted."

The repository has not been deleted, and I can access it. There is a button “reaccept”, but clicking the button, the problem remains.

Strangely, the students who accepted the assignment earlier that week, are able to work on it.

The repositories are all within my organization, and they are set to either private or internal.

These are a few things I already tried without success:

  • Creating new assignments on a new classroom
  • Creating new assignments without starter code
  • Creating new assignments based on a public template repository

This is really disruptive, as we have several cohorts running, and all seem to be affected. I start to think this may be a bug related to a breaking change on Github. Is anyone else experiencing similar issues? If, so did you find a workaround?

Thank you in advance for your feedback,
Joana
Joana

#2

Hi!

Can you write to us at https://support.github.com/contact with a link to your assignment so we can take a closer look?

#3

I have opened a ticket here:

This is a very disruptive issue, as it is affecting all our classrooms and instructors have not been able to track student’s progress for the last week.

Is there a number I can call?

              Thank you,
#4

For anyone who is experimenting a similar issue, I have a few updates.

After making experiments, I realized that users are only able to accept assignments if they belong to the organization.

I am not sure if this is an intended feature from Github, but it is very disruptive from the organizational point of view, as it would mean they would have access to all the repos from our organization, including solutions.

#5

Hi!

I just wanted to let you know that this issue has been patched. Students that are not organization members can now accept assignments.

Sorry for the disruptions.

Stephanie

#6

Something like 10 days ago we had non-members users accepting assignments and we didn’t run into any problems at all. That sounds quite strange in light of this announcement.

#7

What happened to use was that the users were automatically added to the organization, when accepting the assignments. We removed them manually because we don’t want them to have access to our internal repos, and as they were removed from the organization, they could not access the assignments anymore.

#8

Thanks @doublebyte1 for the clarification.
Non-members were made outside collaborators in our case, so all good (luckily) :+1:t2:

#9

Oh I should have shared more about the users affected by this issue. This affected any organizations that have the Allow members to invite outside collaborators to repositories for this organization setting disabled. With that turned on, Classroom wasn’t able to add any students outside the organization to a repository.

#10

Thanks! This makes sense.
Anyway, it seems to apply only to GitHub Enterprise orgs as per the documentation.

In fact, on our org that particular option is not available.