I’m also running into a similar issue - a developer recently had to enter credit card information for access to shared runners. It seems that this is to avoid crypto mining abuse: Preventing Crypto Mining abuse on GitLab.com SaaS.
I’m okay putting my credit card information in somewhere, but I really don’t want to have student developers needing to provide any financial information. Is there a way around this? Or does everyone who pushes to a repository with shared runners need to provide credit card information?
If that’s the case, is there any information in the documentation about whether the credit card information is stored? I’m concerned that a student (or anyone) might get a charge for e.g. over-using minutes, or because of an accounting mistake (this happened to me once and it was a nasty surprise!).
It seems like there are a few other similar, “could we please have another form of user validation”, issues: