# Status and availability

Status and availability let your teammates know roughly how quickly you'll
be responding to messages.

A **status** is a customizable message visible to all team members. A
typical status might be "in a meeting", "on vacation", or "visiting SF next week".

Your **availability** is a colored dot (like <span class="indicator green solid"></span>)
that indicates if you're currently active on Zulip, idle,
offline, or unavailable. If you're not current active, Zulip also lets your
teammates know when you were last active.

## Set a status

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1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.

1. Click the ellipsis (<i class="zulip-icon ellipsis-v-solid"></i>) to the right.

1. Click **Set a status message**.

1. Set a status messages and click **Save**.

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You can view anyone else's status by hovering over their name in the left or
right sidebar, or by clicking their name or avatar in the main message feed. If
they haven't set a status, no status will appear.

## About availability

There are four possible availabilities:

* **Active** (<span class="indicator green solid"></span>): Zulip is
  open and in focus on web, desktop or mobile, or was in the last 140
  seconds.

* **Idle** (<span class="indicator orange"></span>): Zulip is open on
  your computer (either desktop or web), but you are not active.

* **Offline** (<span class="indicator grey"></span>): Zulip is not
  open on your computer.

* **Unavailable** (<span class="indicator grey-line"></span>): You can
  always manually set your availability to unavailable.

For [Group PMs](/help/private-messages), a green circle
(<span class="indicator green solid"></span>)
means all users in the group are active. A pale green circle (<span
class="indicator green"></span>) means that some are active and some are
not. A white circle (<span class="indicator grey"></span>) means that none
are active.

You can see when someone was last recorded as active by hovering over
their name in the left or right sidebar (even if the user is marked as
unavailable).

## Set yourself as unavailable

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1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.

1. Click the ellipsis (<i class="zulip-icon ellipsis-v-solid"></i>) to the right.

1. Click **Set yourself as unavailable**.

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## Disable updating availability

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** (or **Unavailable**, if you've
set an appropriate status), 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 time you enabled this setting.

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{settings_tab|notifications}

1. Under **Other notification settings**, in the **Presence**
   subsection, toggle **Display my availability to other users**.

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Note that because this setting works by making your availability stop
updating, you'll still appear to other users as active for a few
minutes after disabling updates to your availability.