@Blauelf, after fixing this, I realized I did not declare articles and contentString as global variables. I did so, but I have encountered another issue. My marker window opens and shows it's currently loading, but nothing is appearing, even after several minutes.

@Blauelf, good idea. I updated the question with a picture of my console. Basically, the code does run except for my articles function. The map loads successfully, and it's searchable. When you click a search suggestion, markers appear on the map.

@curiouskiwi, thank you. I am taking the 2018 version on edX currently.

@curiouskiwi, does this mean that the current version of the scripts.js distro code and spec for 2018 is ok to use for the problem set?

Thank you very much! I completely missed this after looking at the code for so long.

Ah, that makes sense. I hadn't gotten that far yet. Thanks.

@Blauelf, I corrected the user-exists logic. And I believe I've set up the user id properly too. What happens is that the user is logged in, but there's no redirect and a "400 error TODO" is displayed on every page I navigate too.