This is probably the same bug: I can not add a Facilitator to a course I have created. It returns an error: Sorry, Kunst is not an existing user. But the user definitely exists: https://tools.wmflabs.org/guc/?user=Kunst

The course is https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Львівська_національна_музична_академія/Електронна_і_компʼютерна_музика/overview

The similarity I see among all the four users mentioned — they do not have enwiki in their SUL. I tested adding to the course users who went to English Wikipedia, it's working.

It's a pity, if having enwiki connected to the SUL is influencing the Dashboard work.

Just created a test account on a non-English Wikipedia. Then I tried adding that account as a Facilitator and it failed. Bust as soon as I visited English Wikipedia and logged in there with the test account, I could add it as a Facilitator. So it seems to depend on the account existence specifically on English Wikipedia.

Thanks for reporting this. I've deployed a patch that changes the wiki to meta for importing new users by username. That should allow almost any user to be added to a program on the dashboard.

Please try it out and confirm that it's fixed.

(This bug only affected users who were being added by the facilitator manually; users with logging in with OAuth would visit en.wiki and automatically have their account created during the login process.)

Thank you, @Ragesoss, for looking into this so urgently. I still can not add the user though - they haven't got a meta account either. I think that a full solution would be to change the requirement from a specific wiki to any wiki that is connected to SUL. And I wonder which one - Engilsh Wikipedia or Meta - is more likely to be the wiki that a teacher at a university will have an account on?

@Yury_Bulka New accounts will automatically get created on Meta. There are some related bugs that cause that process to fail on rare occasions — T148696 — and some older accounts were created before the automatic creation on meta was active. But in theory, new users should all end up with accounts on Meta.

@Ragesoss, thank you, good to know. So this leaves us with a relatively small subset of users who we can hopefully ask to login on Meta once.