Status and availability

Status and availability let everyone know roughly how quickly you’ll be responding to messages.

A status is a customizable emoji, along with a short message. A typical status might be ”📅 In a meeting” or ”🏠 Working remotely”. To make it easy to notice, the status emoji is shown next to your name in the sidebars, message feed, and compose box.

Your availability is a colored dot (like ) that indicates if you’re currently active on Zulip, idle, or offline. You can also go invisible to appear offline to other users.

Statuses

Set a status

You can set a status emoji, status message, or both.

Via user card

1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.
2. Click on the ellipsis () to open your user card.
3. Click Set status or Edit status.
4. Click to select one of the common statuses, or choose any emoji and/or write a short message.
5. Click Save.

Via personal settings

1. Click on your profile picture in the upper right corner of the web or desktop app.
2. Click Set status or Edit status.
3. Click to select one of the common statuses, or choose any emoji and/or write a short message.
4. Click Save.

Mobile

1. Tap the Menu () tab in the bottom right corner of the app.
2. Tap My profile.
3. Tap Set status or Status.
4. Select one of the common statuses, or choose any emoji and/or write a short message.
5. Tap Save.

Clear a status

Via user card

1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.
2. Click on the ellipsis () to open your user card.
3. Click on the to the right of your current status.

Via personal settings

1. Click on your profile picture in the upper right corner of the web or desktop app.
2. Click on the to the right of your current status.

Mobile

1. Tap the Menu () tab in the bottom right corner of the app.
2. Tap My profile.
3. Tap Status.
4. Tap Clear, and then Save in the top right corner of the app.

View a status

Status emoji are shown next to a user’s name in the sidebars, message feed, and compose box in the web and desktop apps, and next to the user’s profile picture and name in the mobile app.

Status emoji and status messages are also shown on user cards in the web and desktop apps.

Desktop/Web

1. Hover over a user’s name in the right sidebar, or in the Direct messages section in the left sidebar, to view their status message if they have one set.

Tip: You can also click on a user’s profile picture or name on a message they sent to view their status in their user card, or configure status text to always be shown in the right sidebar.

Mobile

1. Tap on a user’s profile picture or name to view their status message.
2. If they have one set, it will appear under their name on their profile.

Configure how statuses are displayed

You can choose whether or not status text is displayed in the right sidebar. With the compact option, only status emoji are shown.

Desktop/Web

1. Go to Preferences.
2. Under Information, select Compact or Show status and text for the user list style.

Tip: You can always hover over a user’s name in the right sidebar to view their status message if they have one set.

Availability

There are three availability states:

• Active (): Zulip is open and in focus on web, desktop or mobile, or was in the last 140 seconds.
• Idle (): Zulip is open on your computer (either desktop or web), but you are not active.
• Offline (): Zulip is not open on your computer, or you have turned on invisible mode.

View availability

Desktop/Web

1. View a user’s availability on the user list in the right sidebar, the direct messages list in the left sidebar, or their user card. If there is no availability indicator, the user is offline.

Tip: You can see when someone offline was last active by hovering over their name in the left or right sidebar.

Mobile

1. Tap on a user’s profile picture or name. Their availability appears to the left of their name on their profile.

Invisible mode

Zulip supports the privacy option of never updating the availability information for your account. The result is that you will always appear to other users as Offline, regardless of your activity in Zulip.

With this setting, your “Last active” time displayed to other users in the UI will be frozen as the approximate time you enabled this setting. Your activity will still be included in your organization’s statistics.

Tip: Consider also not allowing other users to see when you have read messages.

Toggle invisible mode

Desktop/Web

1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.
2. Click on the ellipsis () to open your user card.
3. To enable, you’ll select Go invisible.
4. To disable, you’ll select Turn off invisible mode.

Tip: You can also toggle this setting in the Account & privacy tab of your Personal settings menu.

Mobile

1. Tap the Menu () tab in the bottom right corner of the app.
2. Tap My profile.
3. Toggle Invisible mode.

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