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Notifications

Pawtograder keeps a notification inbox inside the app, emails you about discussion and course activity, and — while you have an open office hours chat — can alert you in your browser.

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Where notifications appear

  • In-app inbox: the inbox icon in the top-right corner of every course page. A blue badge shows your unread count, capped at 9+. Click the icon for your recent notifications and a View all link; a Mark all as read button appears once you have more than one unread.
  • Email: Pawtograder emails you about discussion posts and replies, office hours activity, regrade request activity, group invitations and membership changes, and being added to a course.
  • Browser, sound, tab title and favicon: for new messages in an office hours chat, Pawtograder can show a desktop notification, play a sound, flash the browser tab title, and put an unread count on the tab’s favicon. All four fire only while you are not actively looking at the page, and they follow your active help request across the whole site — not just the office hours pages.
Desktop notifications also need your browser’s permission. Grant it from Notification Settings below, or from the Enable prompt Pawtograder shows inside a help request chat. If your browser has already blocked notifications for the site, Pawtograder says so and you have to re-allow them from the lock icon in your browser’s address bar.

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The notifications page

View all in the inbox popover opens the full notifications page. It is not in the course menu, so reach it from that link, by pressing g then n, or by searching for “Notifications” in the global search palette. Notifications are grouped into Regrade Requests, Office Hours, Discussion Threads, and Other. Each group has its own Mark all as read and Delete all buttons, alongside a page-wide pair at the top.
Delete all permanently removes those notifications and cannot be undone.

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Notification Settings

Click your avatar in the top-right corner to open the user menu, then choose Notification Settings. Office Hours Chat Notifications controls the four in-browser channels: Browser Notifications, Sound Notifications (with a volume slider), Title Flashing, and Favicon Badge. All are enabled by default, and they save as soon as you flip them. Test Notification fires a sample so you can confirm they work. Email Notification Preferences has one setting for students, Discussion Board Notifications:
  • Immediate: an email as soon as a new post or reply arrives
  • Digest: one summary email per hour instead
  • Disabled: no discussion emails at all
Click Save Preferences to apply your email choice.

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Watching posts and following topics

You are only notified about discussion activity you have opted into, and the two kinds of subscription differ:
  • Watch a post to be notified of every reply to it. Replying to a post watches it automatically.
  • Follow a topic to be notified of new posts in that topic — but not of replies to them.
Every discussion email ends with a footer saying which of the two brought you that email, plus one-click links to unfollow that post or that topic, open your notification settings, or disable discussion emails entirely. Opening an unsubscribe link takes effect right away.

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What triggers a notification

  • A new message in an office hours help request you are part of
  • A staff member is assigned to your help request, or its status changes
  • A reply on a discussion post you watch, or a new post in a topic you follow
  • Your discussion post is merged into another one as a duplicate
  • A new comment on a regrade request you are involved in, or a change to its status, including escalation (see Regrade Requests)
  • You are invited to a group, added to one, or removed from one, or a group join request is filed or decided (see Forming Groups). Group notifications are held back until the assignment is released, so instructors can set groups up in advance.
  • You are added to a course
Creating a help request notifies course staff, not you. Nothing notifies you when your position in the office hours queue changes — the floating help widget shows your position live instead.

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Subscribing to the course calendar

If your instructor has connected a course calendar, your course dashboard shows a schedule card with today, week, and month views. The calendar icon in the top-right corner of that card, labelled Subscribe to calendar, opens a Subscribe to Calendar popover that builds a feed URL you can add to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook. The feed contains:
  • Office hours and course events, from the calendars your instructor connected
  • Assignment release dates, as all-day entries titled Released: <assignment name>
  • Assignment due dates, as timed entries titled Due: <assignment name>
  • Your lab section’s meetings, if you pick a lab section. Cancelled meetings are left out.
  • Your class section’s meetings, if you pick a class section. Pawtograder generates one entry per meeting day between the course start and end dates from the section’s listed meeting times.
Two kinds of assignment are left out: archived assignments, and assignments whose due date is set relative to your lab meeting rather than to a fixed date and time. All times use your course’s time zone. To subscribe:
1

Open the Subscribe popover

Click the calendar icon in the top-right corner of the schedule card on your course dashboard.
2

Choose your sections

Class Section and Lab Section come prefilled with the sections you are enrolled in, and each option lists the section’s CRN alongside its instructor or lab leader. Both are optional: leave one set to No class section or No lab section to keep those meetings out of the feed.
3

Choose what to include

Include office hours and Include course events are both on by default. Clear either one to drop that category.
4

Copy the URL

Click the copy button next to Subscription URL. It copies the webcal: form of the URL, which most calendar apps recognize as a subscription rather than a one-time import.
5

Add it in your calendar app

Use your calendar app’s “add calendar by URL” option and paste the URL.
The feed does not tell your calendar app how often to check for updates, so the refresh interval is entirely up to the app. On the Pawtograder side, each response is cached for five minutes, and Pawtograder polls your instructor’s connected calendars every five minutes. A change your instructor makes reaches the feed within minutes, but it will not reach your calendar until your app next re-fetches.
The feed URL needs no login, and it is not tied to your account: two students who pick the same sections get an identical calendar. Anyone you share the URL with can read your course’s schedule, so treat it as course-internal.

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Troubleshooting

If you stop receiving browser notifications:
  1. Confirm Browser Notifications is still on in Notification Settings, then use Test Notification
  2. Confirm Pawtograder still has notification permission in your browser’s site settings
  3. Check your OS-level “Do Not Disturb” or Focus settings
  4. Reload the page after granting permission so Pawtograder picks up the change
Test from a different tab or window. Browser, sound, title and favicon alerts deliberately stay silent while the Pawtograder tab is the one you are looking at.