Security Blocking HTML Repls

[MrBrash]

Hi everyone, trying to get to the bottom of this issue I’m having with my students. Sometimes the Chrome browser blocks the external URLs for student projects. For example, when visiting a sample project, we receive this screenshot:

The URL in question is: 34-tables-and-lists-mrbrashstudent.ics3uc-s1-2022.repl.co

Sometimes students can fix this by renaming the Repl, getting a new URL. However, this doesn’t always work. I’m unsure if this is a Chrome browser issue (I suspect it is) or my school’s network, etc… Pretty sure I’ve seen this problem at home as well which is why I suspect the browser. I would love to instruct my students to use a different browser, but we’re on Chromebooks sooooo…

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[not-ethan]

I get that also. Best bet is to report this to Replit.

[MrBrash]

Already did. Just hoping someone already had an answer.

[hugoondev]

Click on details and search for a text that says to access replit.com. You might be able to access it!

[MrBrash]

Ok thanks, @hugoondev - I’ll give that a try the next time it happens. I’m pretty sure I would have clicked on that but I don’t remember seeing anything helpful in it. Again - I forget. Cheers.

[IanAtCSTeach]

Thanks for posting + reporting @MrBrash I’ll share this thread with the Replit Support team as well and will come back to you if there is any useful information!

[MrBrash]

I have verified that this is not an option - there is no way to bypass that red screen from the details section or anything like that. The typical “visit this unsafe site” is removed by our admin of the Chromebooks at our school.

@IanAtCSTeach A student has a currently blocked site: https://34.ics3uc-s1-2022.repl.co

I’ve instructed the student not to rename the Repl for possible troubleshooting.

[hugoondev]

Hey @MrBrash,

what I’m going to say is a really bad idea, but may be the only solution. So you said that when students rename their repls sometime it works, well my idea is this… use a repl which you guys can access to and put this code on the repl :

<iframe width="1080"
    height="1080" src="REPL URL">
</iframe>

Hope it works!

[MrBrash]

I like the idea - and it did work for me… but asking young students to do that will likely confuse a lot of them. However, big kudos for a viable solution.

If I need to go down that road in the future, I’ll hold it in my back pocket. Thank you for that!

[hugoondev]

No problem, hope it works in the future!

[hugoondev]

Hey @MrBrash,

I’ve made this to make teachers and students life easier when viewing a repl, it’s the idea I was talking about but with a simple UI, hope it helps: Repl Check! It has a shortened URL named: gg.gg/replcheck so students and teachers can easily memorize it!

Is it helpful for you and your students?

[MrBrash]

Very cool - I like it!! 100% if I have students with that blocked issue in the future, we’ll use that. I wonder what that does for debugging with errors in the console or loading other pages (if a project has more than one HTML file), etc… Time will tell!

Thanks again.

[ShaneAtReplit]

Hey @MrBrash!

I’m happy to say that Google has released a fix on our end that will prevent this issue from ever happening again. That said, if this does come up again, please do let us know!