Zulip

2.0.0 — 2019-03-01

Highlights:

• Added automation for synchronizing user avatars, custom profile
  fields, disabled status, and more from LDAP/active directory.
• Added support for explicitly setting oneself as “away” and “user
  status” messages.
• Added a built-in /poll slash command for lightweight polls.
• Added experimental support for using Zoom as the video chat
  provider. We now support Jitsi, Google Hangouts, and Zoom.
• Added support for branding the top-left corner of the logged in app
  with an organization’s logo.
• Zulip’s “Guest users” feature is no longer experimental.
• The HipChat/Stride data import tool is no longer experimental.
  Our HipChat and Slack import tools are now well-tested with millions
  of messages, 10,000s of users, and 100,000s of uploaded files.
• Added a built-in tool for backups and restoration.
• Deprecated support for Ubuntu Trusty. Zulip 2.0.x will continue to
  support Ubuntu Trusty, but Zulip 2.1.0 will remove support for
  installing on Trusty.

Upgrade notes:

• This release adds support for [submitting basic usage statistics] to
  help the Zulip core team. This feature can be enabled only if a server
  is using the [Mobile Push Notification Service][mpns-statistics-docs],
  and is enabled by default in that case. To disable it, set
  SUBMIT_USAGE_STATISTICS = False in /etc/zulip/settings.py.

Full feature changelog:

• Added support for CentOS 7 in the development environment
  provisioning process. This is an important step towards production
  CentOS/RHEL 7 support.
• Added a new invitation workflow with reusable links.
• Added a new Azure Active Directory authentication integration.
  New authentication backends supported by python-social-auth can now be
  added with just a few dozen lines of code.
• Added API documentation for user groups and custom emoji.
• Administrators can now easily delete all messages in a topic.
• Added display of a user’s role (administrator, guest, etc.) in
  various relevant places.
• Added support for sending “topic” rather than the legacy “subject”
  for the topic in most API endpoints.
• Added helpful notifications for some common webhook
  misconfigurations.
• Added organization setting to control whether users are allowed to
  include message content in missed-message emails (for compliance).
• Added an automated notification when streams are renamed.
• Added support for changing the default notification sound.
• Added Ctrl+. shortcut for narrowing to current compose recipient.
• Added icons to indicate which “organization settings” tabs are
  available to regular users.
• Added a tool for migrating from S3 to the local file uploads backend.
• Added protocol for communicating version incompatibility to mobile apps.
• Added support for copying avatar and other profile data when
  creating a second account on a Zulip server with a given email address.
• Added /digest endpoint for viewing the current digest email on the web.
• Added alert for when a user sends a message when scrolled too far up.
• Added internationalization for outgoing emails.
• Added a ReviewBoard integration, and improved numerous existing integrations.
• Added support for multi-line messages for the /me feature.
• Added markdown rendering of text when displaying custom profile fields.
• Added “silent mentions” syntax (@_**Tim Abbott**), which show
  visually, but don’t trigger a notification to the target user.
• Added support for using lightbox in compose preview.
• Changes in date no longer force a repeated recipient bar. This
  fixes a common source of confusion for new users.
• Suppressed notifications when quoting a message mentioning yourself.
• Message editing now has the compose widgets for emoji, video calls, etc.
• Message editing now has a markdown preview feature just like compose.
• Message editing now uses same “enter-sends” behavior as compose.
• Organization administrators can now edit users’ custom profile fields.
• Optimized performance of data import from Slack, HipChat, etc.
• Improved “new user” emails to clearly indicator login details.
• Improved the UI for “drafts” and “message edit history”.
• Improved linkifier handling of languages with character alphabets.
• Improved accessibility of emoji rendering in messages bodies.
• Eliminated UI lag when using “Quote and reply”.
• Expanded production documentation for more unusual deployment options.
• Expanded set of characters allowed in custom Linkifiers.
• Optimized development provisioning; now takes 2s in the no-op case.
• Zulip’s Help Center now has nicely generated open graph tags.
• Fixed missing API authentication headers for mobile file access.
• Fixed various select and copy-paste issues.
• Fixed various back button bugs in settings UI.
• Fixed various mobile web visual issues.
• Fixed unnecessary resizing of animated custom emoji.
• Fixed several performance issues for organizations with 1000s of streams.
• Fixed various error handling bugs sending push notifications.
• Fixed handling of diacritics in user-mention typeahead.
• Fixed several bugs with importing data into Zulip’s S3 backend.
• Fixed display of full recipients list in “private messages” hover.
• Fixed bugs involving muting and renamed streams.
• Fixed soft-deactivation performance issues with many thousands of users.
• Countless behind-the-scenes improvements to Zulip’s codebase,
  tooling, automated tests, error handling, and APIs.