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Queue Configuration

Queue setup lives under Settings → Queue Management and Settings → Templates. Both are open to instructors and graders.

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Queue Management

Queue Management page showing the Office Hours Description field with its Save Description button, and Help Queue Management with a Create New Queue button and one queue card with Edit and Delete
A course can have any number of queues. Common shapes are one per campus, one per lab section, or one per assignment during a busy week. Each card shows the queue’s name, type, demo badge, an Inactive chip when it is not active, its description, and whether it is available. From the card you can open its Discord channel, Edit it, or Delete it after confirming. Create New Queue and Edit Help Queue offer the same fields:
Create New Help Queue dialog with fields for Queue Name, Description, Queue Type, Max Concurrent Requests, Ordinal, Color, and Closing Time, plus checkboxes for available, active, and demo queue
Ordinals are kept unique for you. Moving a queue to a position that is taken shifts the queue already there, and everything after it, one place later, so you never end up with two queues claiming the same slot.
Three fields on this form, and one figure on the queue card, are saved and displayed, but they do not change how the queue behaves. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.
  • Max Concurrent Requests is recorded and displayed on the queue card, but the queue keeps accepting requests past that number.
  • Closing Time is recorded and displayed on the queue card as a “Closes” time, and the queue keeps taking requests past it. To stop new requests at a set time, uncheck Queue is available to students yourself when you want the queue closed.
  • Color is saved but is not what the interface displays. Queue badges take their color from the queue type instead.
  • Queue Depth on the card is a stored figure rather than a live count, so read it as a starting value rather than the current one. For the live count, use the open-request number on the dashboard and the queue cards.

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Available, active, and who sees what

The two flags are not interchangeable, and no single surface checks both. An inactive queue that is still available therefore stays listed for students and still accepts requests, while disappearing from your dashboard. Use available to close a queue for business, and active to tidy your own dashboard.

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Office hours description

The Office Hours Description field at the top of Queue Management writes one markdown block for the whole course. It renders in the student help drawer and above the new-request form. Its helper text claims it appears at the top of the office hours page, which it does not.

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Discord and the calendar

Each queue card carries one button that opens the queue’s Discord channel. Calendar events are matched to a queue by explicit link first, then by a case-insensitive match between the event’s queue name and the queue’s name; the shift times that match produces are the ones on the staff queue cards, described in Running Office Hours. The calendar URL itself is set under Course Settings → Discord, in the Calendar Integration section. See Course Settings.

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Templates

A template is a prompt structure that pre-fills the description box on a new request, so students arrive having already answered “what have you tried” and “what is the error”. Under Settings → Templates, each template has a name, a category, an optional description, the content itself, and an active flag. The category groups your own list on this page; the student picker lists names only. Templates are grouped by category under Active Templates and Inactive Templates, and each card offers Edit, Deactivate or Activate, and Delete.
Creating your first active template makes template selection mandatory for students. When exactly one active template exists it is applied automatically and its content is pre-filled; with two or more, students must pick one. Deactivating a template hides it from students without losing it.

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See also