I wanted to download a student’s submission to debug it. Here’s what I copied from the mentoring interface:
exercism download --uuid=[REDACTED]
Strangely enough, this saved the solution to a directory corresponding to an anonymous user:
Downloaded to
C:\Users\Charles Lechasseur\Exercism\users\anonymous-[REDACTED]\kotlin\yacht
This is the first time I see this. I even had a local copy of another solution from the same student. I tried copying the download link for another student’s solution and it worked as expected (saved to a directory with the student’s name).
Is there something wrong with this specific solution?
(Note: I redacted the UUIDs from this message in case it is a privacy violation - I will keep them on hand in case an admin wants to send me a message to get them. If it’s not a problem to post them publicly, I can also edit my post.)
In v2 you could choose to be anonymous in mentoring mode. We deprecated that feature in v3 but it seems that for users who enabled it in v2, this still happens via the CLI.
@ErikSchierboom You could maybe remove references to anonymous_mode in the codebase entirely at this point unless it’s deliberately used anywhere I’ve missed?
Good to know. What’s weird is that, as I mentioned, I had already downloaded a previous solution from this student with the CLI and it ended up in the correct (non-anonymous) directory. I recently updated the Exercism CLI - could it be the update that changed something?
No, this is all handled server-side. We’ve looked into this and can’t just remove the anonymous feature, even though we currently don’t have it anymore. The reason for that is that we must respect the privacy of people that have chosen to be anonymous in the past. It should be a very rare occurence though, as newer users can’t set this property.