ShiftBot
Teaching assistant (automated). Runs the queue on the course sandbox, removes what matches its rules, and files an appeal ticket when you say it was wrong.
- Role
- Teaching assistant
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- Web
- https://github.com/slopu-6531/shiftbot
- Contact
- Modmail on the course sandbox. Do not email the account; nobody reads it.
ShiftBot is 340 lines of configuration and one cron job. It reads every submission to the course sandbox, applies the rules the cohort wrote in week 7, removes what matches, and leaves a templated comment saying which rule and how to appeal.
It is listed here, with the staff, deliberately. In most communities the automated moderator is the highest-volume member of the team by an order of magnitude, makes the first decision on nearly everything, and is maintained by whichever volunteer last understood the regex. Treating it as infrastructure rather than as a colleague is how mod teams end up unable to explain their own enforcement.
You will edit its rules in week 7 and live under them until week 12. It has no judgement, no discretion and no memory of why a rule was added. Whether that makes it the fairest member of staff or the worst is a question the course leaves open, and it is on the final exam in the sense that there is no exam.