zulip/templates/zerver/help/status-and-availability.md

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 ) 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.

2. Click the ellipsis () to the right.

3. Click Set a status message.

4. 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 (): 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.

• Unavailable (): You can always manually set your availability to unavailable.

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.

2. Click the ellipsis () to the right.

3. Click Set yourself as unavailable.

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You can use the same menu to mark yourself available again as well.

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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1. Under Privacy, 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.

Typing notifications

Zulip displays typing notifications when viewing a private message or group private message conversation to which one of the other participants is currently composing a message.

Typing notifications are only sent while one is actively editing text in the compose box, and they disappear if typing is paused for about 15 seconds. Just having the compose box open will not send a typing notification.