Lichess Classes disappearing from teacher account

[AEM-Montreal]

Exact URL of where the bug happened

https://lichess.org/class

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Log in to our Lichess teacher account.
2. Go to https://lichess.org/class
3. Open the Classes dashboard.
4. Our account currently shows 1 active class and 99 archived classes.
5. Several classes that were previously available are no longer accessible as expected.
6. Some instructors assigned to previous classes can no longer see those classes either.

What did you expect to happen?

Classes created under our school account should remain accessible to the main teacher account and to the instructors assigned to them.

We should also continue to have access to the managed student accounts associated with those classes.

What happened instead?

Several previously available classes are no longer accessible as expected.

Some instructors also no longer have access to classes that had been assigned to them, which makes it difficult for us to manage the student accounts associated with those classes.

Operating system

Windows 10

Browser and version (or alternate access method)

Google Chrome 151

Additional information

We use Lichess Classes extensively for our chess school.

Our account currently shows 1 active class and 99 archived classes.

We would like to understand whether there is an automatic archiving or deletion process, a class limit, or another reason for this behavior, and what we should do to prevent losing access to classes and managed students in the future.

[fitztrev]

Classes do get archived if they haven't been viewed by an teacher within 30 days. Did you get an automated Lichess message when that happened? There's a link to re-open it.

[AEM-Montreal]

Thank you for your reply.

The classes we are looking for are not visible in either our active or archived class lists.

We also checked the email address associated with our main Lichess account (montreal@echecs.org), including the junk/spam folders, and we did not receive an automated email with a reopening link.

Could you please clarify:

1. How can we recover classes that are no longer visible in either the active or archived lists?
2. Is there a limit on the total number of Lichess Classes an account can have?
3. If there is a limit, could this explain why some more recent classes are no longer visible while much older archived classes are still there?

Thank you for your help.

[fitztrev]

It would have been a direct message from within Lichess (to your Lichess inbox).

Is it possible that these classes weren't opened by a teacher in over 30 days?
Do you know a specific class you're looking for (by id or name) but don't see?

Both of those pieces of information would help determine if they can be recovered.

[AEM-Montreal]

Thank you for the clarification.

Yes, it is very possible that these classes were not opened by a teacher for more than 30 days. During the summer session, some of these teachers were on vacation and were not using these particular classes.

The classes we are trying to recover were associated with the following teachers and schedules:

• Ibrahim — Monday around 6:30 PM — advanced-level group
• Guillaume Dupuy — Monday around 6:30 PM — beginner-level group
• Ibrahim Abdel Aal — Saturday from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM — advanced-level group

The exact class titles may have been different, since the level names sometimes varied depending on the students in the group.

We do not have the class IDs, and these classes are currently not visible in either our active or archived class lists.

Could you please let us know whether these classes can be recovered, and if so, how we can reopen them?

Thank you for your help.

[fitztrev]

I just emailed you links to all of your archived classes (beyond the 100 that you can see). You can re-open the ones you want from there

query

db.clas_clas.find(
  { teachers: "username" },
  { name: 1, "archived.at": 1 }
).sort({ archived: 1, "archived.at": -1 }).forEach(c => {
  const archivedDate = c.archived ? c.archived.at.toISOString().slice(0, 10) : "active    ";
  print(`http://lichess.org/class/${c._id}\t${archivedDate}\t${c.name}`);
})

[AEM-Montreal]

Thank you. The links work and we were able to successfully re-open a test class. This solves our immediate recovery problem.

We would now like to make sure we can manage this properly in the future.

Could you please clarify:

1. Is 100 classes only a display limit, or is there an actual limit to the number of classes our account can have?
2. Is there a way for us to permanently remove old classes that we no longer need, or is this unnecessary?
3. Is there a user-facing way for us to access or search classes beyond the 100 displayed, without contacting Lichess each time?
4. We are also not receiving the Lichess inbox notifications when classes are archived. Is there a setting we should check to make sure we receive these messages?

Thank you again for your help.

[fitztrev]

The classes were auto-archived then because in this case they weren't opened by a teacher in over 30 days.

1. There is a display limit of 100 classes at the moment. You can have more than that (as you do), they just won't be displayed.
2. There's no way to permanently remove the ones you no longer need. You can just manually archive them.
3. No, they can't be searched. They're just cut off after 100.
4. Thanks for reporting. We'll investigate.

For 1 and 3, I'll look to see what we can do to change things to make those better.