FAQ
Short answers, each pointing to the page that has the full picture. If something is not working, Troubleshooting is the page to read first; this one explains how mooDesk behaves when it works.
About mooDesk
What is mooDesk? A help desk that runs inside Moodle: tickets, departments, SLA targets, a knowledge base and an agent workspace, built on Moodle's own users, roles, notifications and privacy tooling. It is a local plugin, local_moodesk, developed and maintained by digitalMood. The full feature list is on Features.
Is it free? The Starter edition is free software under the GPL v3, with no licence key and no time limit. Pro and Enterprise are unlocked by a licence key on the same package — see Editions and licence.
Is mooDesk part of Moodle, or endorsed by Moodle HQ? No. mooDesk is an independent third-party plugin and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Moodle HQ. Moodle® is a registered trademark of Moodle Pty Ltd.
Which Moodle versions does it support? Moodle 4.5 LTS or later, on PHP 8.1 or later, with MariaDB or PostgreSQL (MySQL is no longer listed as supported since 2.38.0). The detail, including what the CI matrix actually covers, is in Installation → System requirements.
Which languages does it come in? English and Spanish language packs ship with the plugin. Moodle's usual language mechanisms apply: a user sees mooDesk in their Moodle language when a pack exists, and in English otherwise.
Where do I download it? The download location is not yet published on this portal; see Installation → Getting the package.
Editions and licence
Which edition am I running?mooDesk → License shows the effective edition and the reason for it. There is no edition selector: a site with no key, or with a key that is refused, runs as Starter; a valid key sets the edition from its own tier. What each edition includes is the table in Features → Editions at a glance.
How do I get a licence? Contact support@moodesk.io for licensing information. A key is issued for one site URL and pasted into Site administration → Plugins → Local plugins → mooDesk → Licence key; saving it revalidates immediately — Configuration → License.
I pasted the key and nothing unlocked. The License page names the reason — malformed, forged, untrusted_key, expired, revoked, site_mismatch, a licence issued for an earlier licence format, or a licence that does not state a valid agent capacity for its plan — and each is explained in Configuration → License. The site keeps running as Starter in the meantime, nothing is lost and every agent is kept.
After upgrading to 2.39.0 the site runs as Starter. 2.39.0 accepts only licences in the current format, which states the agent capacity. A licence issued in the earlier format shows This licence was issued for an earlier licence format and is not accepted by this version of mooDesk. Contact support@moodesk.io for a replacement licence and paste it under Licence key. Nothing is deleted and every agent is kept in the meantime — Installation → Upgrading.
After upgrading to 2.37.0 the site runs as Starter. 2.37.0 replaced the licence signing key, so a licence issued before it shows untrusted_key. Contact support@moodesk.io for a re-issued licence and paste it under Licence key. Nothing is deleted in the meantime — Installation → Upgrading.
Can I use my production licence on a staging copy? No. The key is bound to one site URL; on any other it is refused as site_mismatch and the copy runs as Starter. A staging site needs its own key.
How many agents can I have? As many as the capacity on your licence. Starter, without a licence, allows 2. Pro allows the capacity on its licence: 10, 15, 20 or 25. Enterprise allows 50 to 1000, in steps of 25. Every edition has a fixed capacity; for more than 1000 agents, contact support@moodesk.io. An active agent is a user who holds local/moodesk:agent and is neither suspended nor deleted. Add agent stops at the capacity and names the way out for your plan; agents given the role through Moodle's own role screens are counted but not blocked — Configuration → Agents.
What happens if my site has more agents than its capacity? Nothing is removed. This can happen after an upgrade, or when a licence with a smaller capacity is pasted. Every agent is kept and keeps working; the License page and System Health show Agent limit exceeded and No agent has been removed. New agents cannot be added until the count is back under the capacity. Get a licence with the capacity you need, or bring the count under it.
What happens to Pro or Enterprise data if the licence expires? Nothing is deleted. Teams, custom fields, rules, ratings, articles, webhooks and tokens stay in the database; their screens show an upgrade notice and their tasks do nothing. A new key brings everything back as it was.
Does mooDesk contact digitalMood to check the licence? The key itself is verified on your server against a public key embedded in the plugin; no call is made to validate it. What does go out is one download a day of the signed licence revocation list, a public file. That request sends no licence key, user records or ticket content. Like any HTTP request it exposes your server's IP address. Up to and including 2.39.0 it also sends your site URL, inside Moodle's default User-Agent; from 2.39.1 it sends the fixed User-Agent moodesk-crl/2, without the site URL. It can be switched off — Installation → Network and privacy.
Agents and permissions
Who counts as an agent? A user who holds local/moodesk:agent at system context. The mooDesk Agent role created at install holds it together with the capabilities to see every ticket, reply, add notes and manage tickets; mooDesk → Agents → Add agent assigns that role. A role given in a course or category does not count — Configuration → Roles.
Can a site administrator be assigned a ticket? Only if they hold local/moodesk:agent. Administrators can configure and manage everything, but they are not agents — and do not appear in the assignee list — until they are added as one.
Why is an agent missing from the assignee list? Either they are not an agent in the sense above, or the ticket belongs to a department and only its members are offered. Add them to the department, or move the ticket.
Which tickets can an agent see? Every ticket on the site, with local/moodesk:viewall — which the mooDesk Agent role holds. The queue's tabs (mine, unassigned, my departments) are views of that, not restrictions. A user without viewall sees only the tickets they raised.
Can a requester ever see an internal note? No. Internal notes are shown to agents only — not in the requester's ticket thread, not in notifications, not through the REST API.
Tickets and SLA
What are the statuses, and who can reply in each?Open, In progress, Pending, Resolved and Closed. Requesters and agents can reply in every status except Closed, which accepts no replies until an agent reopens it; a reply on a Resolved ticket is how a requester says "not quite". The allowed moves between statuses are in Features → Ticket lifecycle.
What counts as the first response for the SLA? An agent's public reply. An internal note does not stop the first-response clock.
Why did a ticket go red and then green again? The resolution clock pauses while the ticket is Pending — waiting on the requester — and the hourly check clears the breach flag on an active ticket whose deadline moved back out. Once a ticket is Resolved or Closed, its flag freezes as the historical record — Features → SLA on the ticket.
Why does a ticket show no SLA at all? The target for its priority is 0, or its department overrides that target with 0 — Configuration → SLA.
A ticket closed on its own. Why?autoclose_resolved_days is set and the ticket sat Resolved that long; the daily task closed it. Set the value to 0 to stop it — Configuration → Automation.
Is there an audit trail of changes to a ticket? Yes: every change is written to the ticket's history and included in the user's privacy export. The history is not shown on the ticket page in 2.39.0.
Can tickets be merged? On Enterprise. A duplicate is merged into a target and becomes read-only; the merge can be undone for 30 days — Features → Merging duplicates.
Email
Can requesters open tickets by email? On Pro, with one IMAP mailbox that mooDesk polls every five minutes. New mail from an active Moodle user becomes a ticket; a reply to a notification becomes a reply on the ticket. Everything needed, from the mailbox to the reply address, is in Integrations → Email ingestion.
Does it work with Gmail and Microsoft 365? Gmail and Google Workspace: yes, with OAuth 2.0 or an app password. Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online: yes since 2.37.0, with OAuth 2.0 only, on Moodle 4.5.5, 5.0.1 or later. Microsoft 365 business-tenant features (shared mailboxes, admin consent, Conditional Access) are not yet validated. See Integrations → Provider notes.
Does the server need the PHP imap extension? No. mooDesk speaks IMAP over TLS sockets itself; nothing is installed on the server.
Why did a reply by email open a new ticket instead of answering the old one? The reply carried nothing mooDesk could thread on — a mail client that strips headers, a forward instead of a reply — or the ticket was closed. How threading works, and the three reply-authentication modes, are in Integrations → Replying by email.
Can someone who is not a Moodle user open a ticket by mail? No. Mail from an address that does not match an active Moodle user is refused and the operators are alerted; no ticket and no user is created.
Why did one mail create two tickets? It was delivered twice outside the deduplication window (300 seconds by default). Inside the window the same Message-ID, or the same sender and subject, is dropped as a duplicate — Configuration → Operator alerts and retention.
Automations, webhooks and API
Which edition has automations?Pro. Webhooks and the REST API are Enterprise.
Can a rule fire twice on the same ticket? No. Each rule fires at most once per ticket, whatever the trigger, and the outcome is logged. A rule with the time_elapsed trigger never fires in 2.39.0: it can be saved but is not evaluated — Configuration → Automations.
What fires the ticket.updated webhook? A change of priority, category, department or team, and any status change other than to Resolved — that one fires ticket.resolved. Public replies fire ticket.replied; internal notes and assignment changes fire nothing. All six events and their payloads are in Integrations → Events and payload.
When does an API token expire?api_token_lifetime_days after it is issued — 365 by default, 0 for never — fixed at issue time. Each user may hold up to five, issued from mooDesk → API tokens only. Tokens, scopes and the checks every call passes are on API.
Why does my valid token get You are not allowed to use the rest protocol? Its owner lacks webservice/rest:use, a Moodle capability no role holds by default — API → Before you start.
Cron and scheduled tasks
What stops working if cron does not run? SLA breach flags and their notifications, auto-close, email ingestion, webhook deliveries, operator alerts, the licence revocation check and every retention sweep. Ticket notifications that follow an action in the browser still go out — Moodle sends them at once, unless the user chose a daily digest. A site whose cron stopped looks like several unrelated bugs at once; it is the first of the first checks.
How often do the tasks run? Webhook deliveries every minute; mail ingestion and operator alerts every five minutes; the SLA check hourly; auto-close at 02:00; the licence tasks at 03:00 and 03:30; the retention sweeps between 04:20 and 05:50. The table with every task is in Installation → Scheduled tasks.
CSAT and knowledge base
When does a requester get the satisfaction survey? When the ticket reaches the trigger status — Resolved by default — and CSAT is enabled: an invitation goes out through the Ticket notification provider, and their own ticket page shows a How did we do? card while the link is valid. It is sent once per ticket; a later transition does not send it again — Configuration → CSAT.
Where do knowledge base ratings and reads go? A rating is one person's current answer per article translation, exported and erased with the user. Reads, suggestions and searches are anonymous events kept for a configurable time — 365 days by default, 90 for searches, since a person typed those words; search text is kept only for searches that found nothing, redacted — Configuration → General.
Why do articles not appear in Moodle's global search? Global search of articles is a Pro feature and needs Moodle's global search enabled with a search engine, the Knowledge base articles (mooDesk) search area enabled, and the indexing task run since the article was published. mooDesk's own search on the Knowledge page needs none of that.
Can an article be in several languages? On Pro. One article can carry a row per language; each reader gets their Moodle language when a translation exists, with a notice when it falls back to another — Features → Knowledge base.
Privacy and data
Where is the data stored? In your Moodle database and file storage, in mooDesk's own tables. There is no mooDesk cloud component and nothing is synchronised elsewhere.
What leaves the server? Three things, each disclosed and each under your control:
- the daily download of the licence revocation list, a public file. The request sends no licence key, user records or ticket content; it exposes your server's IP address and, up to and including 2.39.0, your site URL through Moodle's default User-Agent (2.39.1 and later send a fixed User-Agent without it; the download can be switched off);
- webhook deliveries (Enterprise), which carry ticket data to the URLs an administrator entered;
- the IMAP connection to the mailbox an administrator configured (Pro), where mooDesk reads mail and, for refusals, sends bounces through Moodle's outgoing mail. A mailbox signed in with OAuth 2.0 also has Moodle's OAuth 2 service obtain and renew its token from Google or Microsoft.
Nothing else. The detail is in Installation → Network and privacy.
Does mooDesk support GDPR data requests? Yes, through Moodle's privacy API. An export includes the user's tickets, replies and notes, custom field answers, CSAT ratings, memberships, the mail they sent in and their audit entries. Erasure anonymises rather than deletes: the tickets stay countable and other people's replies survive, but the user's own content is replaced by a placeholder — Features → Privacy and data.
Is anything deleted automatically? Only operational records with a retention setting: refused and accepted mail records, System Health incidents, webhook delivery logs, knowledge base analytics events and expired merge snapshots. Tickets, replies and ratings are never purged by mooDesk.
Getting help
Something is not working. Where do I start?Troubleshooting: how to read System Health, the five checks that settle most cases, and symptom tables by area.
And if that does not resolve it? Open an issue through Support — bug report, feature request or documentation issue. Issues are public: never include licence keys, tokens, passwords, email addresses or real user data, and sanitise logs before attaching them.
Is there commercial support? Contact support@moodesk.io for licensing and account questions. Bug reports, feature requests and documentation issues go through Support.
Verified against mooDesk 2.39.0.