Resolve a topic
Zulip's topics are very
helpful for customer support, answering questions, investigating
issues and production errors, as well as other workflows.
Resolving topics makes it easy to track the status of each question,
investigation, or notification.
Marking a topic as resolved:
- Puts a ✔ at the beginning of the topic name, e.g.,
example topic
becomes ✔ example topic.
- Triggers an automated notice from Notification Bot indicating that
you resolved the topic. Users can
configure
whether these notices are automatically marked as read.
- Changes whether the topic appears when using the
is:resolved and
-is:resolved search filters.
Marking a topic as unresolved removes the ✔ and also triggers an
automated notice from Notification Bot.
It's often helpful to define a policy for when to resolve topics that
fits how topics are used in a given channel. Here are some common
approaches for deciding when to mark a topic as resolved:
- Support: When the support interaction is complete. Resolving
topics is particularly useful for internal support teams that might
not need a dedicated support ticket tracker.
- Issues, errors and production incidents: When investigation or
incident response is complete, and any follow-up work has been
transferred to the appropriate tracker.
- Workflow management: When the work described in the topic is
complete and any follow-ups have been transcribed.
- Answering questions: When the question has been fully answered,
and follow-ups would be best discussed in a new topic.
Users can resolve or unresolve a topic if they have
permission to do so.
Mark a topic as resolved
-
Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.
-
Click on the ellipsis ().
-
Select Mark as resolved.
You can also click on the mark as resolved ()
icon in the message recipient bar to mark an unresolved topic as resolved.
-
Press and hold a topic until the long-press menu appears.
-
Tap Mark as resolved.
If you are viewing a single topic, you can access the long-press
menu from the bar at the top of the app.
Mark a topic as unresolved
Marking a topic as unresolved normally triggers an automated notice from
Notification Bot. However, unresolving a topic right after you resolved it
removes the original notice instead. This is helpful if you resolved a topic by
accident.
-
Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.
-
Click on the ellipsis ().
-
Select Mark as unresolved.
You can also click on the ellipsis ()
in the message recipient bar, and select the Mark as unresolved option.
-
Press and hold a topic until the long-press menu appears.
-
Tap Mark as unresolved.
If you are viewing a single topic, you can access the long-press
menu from the bar at the top of the app.
Search for messages in unresolved topics
-
Click the search () icon in the top bar to open the search box.
-
Type -is:resolved, or start typing and select Exclude topics marked as
resolved from the typeahead.
-
(optional) Enter additional search terms or
filters.
-
Press Enter.
You can also use the / or Ctrl + K
keyboard shortcut to start searching messages.
To get a feed of unread messages in all unresolved topics, search for
is:unresolved is:unread.
Search for messages in resolved topics
-
Click the search () icon in the top bar to open the search box.
-
Type is:resolved, or start typing and select Topics marked as resolved
from the typeahead.
-
(optional) Enter additional search terms or
filters.
-
Press Enter.
You can also use the / or Ctrl + K
keyboard shortcut to start searching messages.
Filter by whether topics are resolved
-
Click on a channel in the left sidebar.
-
Click show all topics at the bottom of the list of recent topics in the
selected channel.
-
In the search box at the top of the list of topics, type is:.
-
Choose Unresolved topics or Resolved topics from the typeahead
suggestions.
Zulip lets you automatically mark as read Notification Bot notices
indicating that someone resolved or unresolved
a topic, or do so just for topics you don't follow.
-
Go to Notifications.
-
Under Topic notifications, configure Automatically mark resolved topic
notices as read.
Sending messages to resolved topics
You can send messages to a resolved topic, which is handy for "thank you"
messages, or to discuss whether a topic was incorrectly marked as resolved.
When a topic is resolved or unresolved, users' compose boxes and message views
automatically update to show the topic's current state. This helps make sure
everyone sends messages to the correct place.
Integrations will still send messages to the
original topic after a topic is resolved. This is useful for alerting
integrations, where a repeating alert might have a different cause. As usual,
you can mark the topic resolved once you've investigated the situation.
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