zulip/help/status-and-availability.md

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.

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1. Tap Set your status.

2. Tap to select one of the common statuses, or choose any emoji and/or write a short message.

3. Tap Save.

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Clear a status

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1. Tap Set your status.

2. Tap the x () to the right of your current status.

3. Tap Save.

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View a status

Status emoji are shown next to a user's name in the sidebars, message feed, and compose box. Status emoji and status messages are also shown on user cards.

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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.

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1. Tap on a user's profile picture or name to open their profile.

2. Look for their status below the user's role (e.g., Member) if they have one set.

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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.

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1. 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.

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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.

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

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.

Toggle invisible mode

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1. To enable, you'll select Go invisible.

2. To disable, you'll select Turn off invisible mode.

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

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1. Toggle Invisible mode.

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