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Moderation and Karma

Three Settings pages deal with individual students rather than with queues: Moderation, Student Karma, and Student Activity. Every one of them is also reachable from the buttons in a request’s header, described in Help Requests.

Moderation

Create Moderation Action takes a student, an action type of Warning, Temporary Ban, or Permanent Ban, a reason, and a specific help request the action relates to. A duration is required for a temporary ban, and the expiry is computed when you save. Actions are listed as cards with the type, a Permanent, Active, or Expired badge, the student, the moderator, the reason, the timestamps, and the request number, filtered by All, Active, or Expired. A warning shows the student a banner on office hours pages for seven days and takes nothing away. A ban replaces every student office hours page with a notice giving the reason and the time remaining, and blocks the chat composer. Instructors can delete a moderation record, and deleting is the only way to lift a ban early. Graders can create actions but not delete them.
A ban covers office hours and nothing else. It replaces the student’s office hours pages with the ban notice and takes away the chat composer; their enrollment, assignments, grades, and the rest of the course are untouched. Because a ban is applied in the interface rather than at the account level, treat moderation as a course-policy tool rather than a security boundary: do not rely on a ban to keep one student away from another, and escalate anything that needs a hard guarantee through your institution’s channels. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.

Student Karma

Student Karma Management holds one private note per entry: a student, a score the form limits to the range -20 to +20, and internal notes students never see. The list sorts by score, badges each entry from Excellent to Problematic, and totals the entries above and below zero. The modal offers guideline bands for the score.
The Create Student Karma Entry dialog: a student picker noting 30 students available, a Karma Score field with its -20 to +20 range, an Internal Notes box marked internal only, and a Karma Guidelines panel listing the five score bands
Karma is display-only. The score is read to sort, badge, and star this page and the Student Activity summary. It does not change queue order, request priority, or whether a student can file a request, and students cannot see it.Saving an entry can fail. If the dialog reports an error, the entry was not saved. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.
Do not confuse this with the discussion karma on student profiles, which is computed from discussion likes. See Discussion.

Student Activity

Pick a student and the page shows three stacked sections: their karma entry if one exists, their five most recent moderation actions, and their ten most recent office hours events, each labeled as a request created, updated, or resolved, a message sent, or a video joined or left. With no student selected it aggregates recent activity across the roster. The student picker is the only control. There is no date range and no export; for exportable numbers use Time Tracking.

See also