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Running Office Hours

Staff put themselves on duty one queue at a time. Nobody schedules you here: you start working a queue when your shift begins, and stop when it ends.

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Going on duty

Working view with the Working, All Requests, and Settings header links and one queue card showing its mode, open request count, an empty staff-on-duty list, and a Start Working button
Open Working. Under the Help Queues heading, each queue shows its mode, its count of unresolved requests, who is on duty, and a green Start Working button. Only queues marked active appear here; the page says so and points you at Queue Management for the rest. See Queue Configuration for what the active flag does on each surface. Starting work puts you on duty for that queue. Other staff see you in the queue’s staff-on-duty list, students see the queue as staffed, and the queue becomes selectable in the student New Request menu. You can work several queues at once. Stop Working on a queue card ends that one assignment; Stop Working (n) in the header ends all of them at once. Once you are on duty, Working stops listing queues and lists the requests you are responsible for instead. Help Requests covers what to do with one.
Starting work always records a concurrent-student limit of 1. There is no control for changing it, and it does not limit how many requests can be routed to you at once. Assignment Management displays the value. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.

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Staffing times and the schedule

Each queue card lists the staff currently on duty, the end time of the shift in progress with the time remaining, and the start of the next scheduled shift. Those times come from the course’s office hours calendar, not from the assignment rows: an event counts toward a queue when it is explicitly linked to the queue, or when the event’s queue name matches the queue’s name, ignoring case. With nobody on duty the card reads “No staff currently on duty”. When the course has an office hours or events calendar configured, a Today’s Schedule strip appears above the queue list with buttons for the previous day, today, and the next day. Set the calendar under Course Settings → Discord, in the Calendar Integration section. See Course Settings.

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Two banners you may see

A Real-time updates disconnected warning means queue status and new requests may be stale until the connection recovers. A Notifications are blocked warning means the browser has denied notification permission, so you will not be alerted to new student messages; the banner tells you to allow notifications from the lock icon in the address bar.

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See also