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Resolve a topic

Zulip's topics are very helpful for customer support, answering questions, investigating issues and production errors, as well as other workflows. Resolving topics makes it easy to track the status of each question, investigation, or notification.

Marking a topic as resolved:

  • Puts a ✔ at the beginning of the topic name, e.g. example topic becomes ✔ example topic.
  • Triggers an automated notice from the notification bot indicating that you resolved the topic. This message will be marked as unread only for users who had participated in the topic.
  • Changes whether the topic appears when using the is:resolved and -is:resolved search operators.

Marking a topic as unresolved removes the ✔ and also triggers an automated notice from the notification bot.

It's often helpful to define a policy for when to resolve topics that fits how topics are used in a given stream. Here are some common approaches for deciding when to mark a topic as resolved:

  • Support: When the support interaction is complete. Resolving topics is particularly useful for internal support teams that might not need a dedicated support ticket tracker.
  • Issues, errors and production incidents: When investigation or incident response is complete, and any follow-up work has been transferred to the appropriate tracker.
  • Workflow management: When the work described in the topic is complete and any follow-ups have been transcribed.
  • Answering questions: When the question has been fully answered, and follow-ups would be best discussed in a new topic.

Users can resolve and unresolve a topic if they have permission to edit topics. Organization administrators can configure who can edit topics or turn off message editing entirely. See the guide to message and topic editing for details on when topic editing is allowed.

Mark a topic as resolved

  • Desktop/Web
  • Mobile

  1. Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.

  2. Click on the ellipsis ().

  3. Select Mark as resolved.

You can also click on the ✔ icon in the message recipient bar to mark an unresolved topic as resolved.

  1. Press and hold a topic until the long-press menu appears.

  2. Tap Resolve topic.

If you are viewing a single topic, you can access the long-press menu from the bar at the top of the app.

Mark a topic as unresolved

  • Desktop/Web
  • Mobile

  1. Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.

  2. Click on the ellipsis ().

  3. Select Mark as unresolved.

You can also click on the ✔ icon in the message recipient bar to mark a resolved topic as unresolved.

  1. Press and hold a topic until the long-press menu appears.

  2. Tap Unresolve topic.

If you are viewing a single topic, you can access the long-press menu from the bar at the top of the app.

Details

  • Resolving a topic works by moving the messages to a new topic.
  • Like with all topic editing, Zulip clients update instantly, so human users will likely only send messages to the resolved topic.
  • Integrations will usually send new messages to the original topic (example topic) after a topic is resolved. This is useful for alerting integrations, where a repeating alert might have a different cause. You can mark the topic resolved (as normal) once you've investigated the situation.
  • Users can still send messages to a resolved topic; this is important for "thank you" messages and to discuss whether the topic was incorrectly marked as resolved.