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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.

  • Desktop/Web
  • Mobile

  1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.

  2. Click on the ellipsis () to open your user card.

  3. Click Set a status.

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

  5. Click Save.

  1. Tap your profile picture in the bottom right corner of the app.

  2. Tap Set a status.

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

  4. Tap Save.

View a status

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

You can view status messages by hovering over your or anyone else's name in the left or right sidebar, or by clicking the user's name or avatar in the main message feed to open their user card. If someone hasn't set a message as part of their status, then no status message will appear.

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

  • Desktop/Web
  • Mobile

  1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.

  2. Click on the ellipsis () to open your user card.

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

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

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

  1. Tap your profile picture in the bottom right corner of the app.

  2. Toggle Invisible mode.