When a user changes their GitHub id - brownfield-team/anacapa-github-linker GitHub Wiki

A design flaw of the linker is that it bases GitHub identity on the GitHub username (which users can change) rather than the numeric GitHub id, which most users never see, but is the true immutable unique key value associated with a GitHub account.

If we had based identity on that, rather than GitHub username, and made sure to refresh the GitHub username when it changed, there would be n problem; if a user changed their GitHub username from foobarfum to chrisgaucho, all would be well.

But as it stands, students often realize that a weird username like foobarfum might not look very professional, so they change it at some point to firstnameLastname and then their account in the linker breaks.

So, we have to do a hack to fix it. This page documents that hack.