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zulip/docs/contributing/chat-zulip-org.md

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The chat.zulip.org community

https://chat.zulip.org is the primary communication forum for the Zulip community.

You can go through the simple signup process at that link, and then you will soon be talking to core Zulip developers and other users. To get help in real time, you will have the best luck finding core developers roughly between 17:00 UTC and 6:00 UTC, but the sun never sets on the Zulip community. Most questions get a reply within minutes to a few hours, depending on the time of day.

Community norms

  • Send test messages to #test here or as a PM to yourself to avoid disturbing others.
  • When asking for help, provide the details needed for others to help you. E.g. include the full traceback in a code block (not a screenshot), a link to the code or a WIP PR you're having trouble debugging, etc.
  • Ask questions on streams rather than PMing core contributors. You'll get answers faster since other people can help, and it makes it possible for other developers to learn from reading the discussion.
  • Use @-mentions sparingly. Unlike IRC or Slack, in Zulip, it's usually easy to see which message you're replying to, so you don't need to mention your conversation partner in every reply. Mentioning other users is great for timely questions or making sure someone who is not online sees your message.
  • Converse informally; there's no need to use titles like "Sir" or "Madam".
  • Use gender-neutral language. For example, avoid using a pronoun like her or his in sentences like "Every developer should clean [their] keyboard at least once a week."
  • Follow the community code of conduct.
  • Participate! Zulip is a friendly and welcoming community, and we love meeting new people, hearing about what brought them to Zulip, and getting their feedback. If you're not sure where to start, introduce yourself and your interests in #new members, using your name as the topic.

High traffic community

The chat.zulip.org community sends several thousand messages every single week, about half of them to streams that we have included in the default streams for new users for discoverability. Keeping up with everything happening in the Zulip project is both difficult and rarely a useful goal.

To make the best use of your time, we highly recommend that you unsubscribe from streams that you aren't interested in, and mute streams that are only of occasional interest.

This is a bleeding edge development server

The chat.zulip.org server is frequently deployed off of master from the Zulip Git repository, so please point out anything you notice that seems wrong! We catch many bugs that escape code review this way.

The chat.zulip.org server is a development and testing server, not a production service, so don't use it for anything mission-critical, secret/embarrassing, etc.

Streams

There are a few streams worth highlighting that are relevant for everyone, even non-developers:

  • #announce is for announcements and discussions thereof; we try to keep traffic there to a minimum.
  • #feedback is for posting feedback on Zulip.
  • #design is where we discuss UI and feature design and collect feedback on potential design changes. We love feedback, so don't hesitate to speak up!
  • #user community is for Zulip users to discuss their experiences using and adopting Zulip.
  • #production help is for production environment related discussions.
  • #test here is for sending test messages without inconveniencing other users :). We recommend muting this stream when not using it.

There are dozens of streams for development discussions in the Zulip community (e.g. one for each app, etc.); check out the Streams page to see the descriptions for all of them. Relevant to almost everyone are these:

  • #checkins is for progress updates on what you're working on and its status; usually folks post with their name as the topic. Everyone is welcome to participate!
  • #development help is for asking for help with any Zulip server/webapp development work (use the app streams for help working on one of the apps).
  • #code review is for getting feedback on your work. We encourage all developers to comment on work posted here, even if you're new to the Zulip project; reviewing other PRs is a great way to develop experience, and even just manually testing a proposed new feature and posting feedback is super helpful.
  • #documentation is where we discuss improving Zulip's user, sysadmin, and developer documentation.
  • #translation is for discussing Zulip's translations.
  • #learning is for posting great learning resources one comes across.

There are also official private streams, including large ones for established community contributors (and for GSoC mentors), and small streams where Kandra Labs staff can discuss customer support, production server operations, and security issues. Because our community values are to work in the open, these private streams are relatively low traffic.

Searching for past conversations

When searching for previous discussions of a given topic, we recommend using the streams:public keyword set of operators. This will search the full history of public streams in the organization for keyword (including messages sent before you joined and on public streams you're not subscribed to).