Zulip

6.0 — 2022-11-17

Highlights

• Users can now mark messages as unread.
• Added support for viewing read receipts, along with settings allowing both organizations and individual users to disable them.
• Added new compose box button to navigate to the conversation being composed to, when that is different from the current view.
• Added a scroll-to-bottom button, analogous to the End shortcut, that appears only when scrolling using the mouse.
• Added support for up to 2 custom profile fields being highlighted in a user’s profile summary popover, and added support for a new Pronouns custom field type designed to take advantage of it. Redesigned the custom profile fields administrative UI.
• Redesigned the left sidebar to better organize pinned and inactive streams, highlight topics where the user was mentioned, and better advertise streams that the current user can subscribe to.
• Redesigned the private messages experience in the left sidebar to make browsing conversations more ergonomic, with a similar usage pattern to browsing the topics within a stream.
• Improved “Recent topics” and renamed it to “Recent conversations” with the addition of including private messages in the view. The timestamp links now go to the latest message in the topic, arrow key navigation was improved, topics containing unread mentions are now highlighted, as well as many other bug fixes or subtle improvements.
• Messages containing 3 or fewer emoji reactions now display the names of reacting users alongside the emoji. This eliminates the need to mouse over emoji reactions to find out who reacted in the vast majority of cases.
• Replaced the previous “Unavailable” status with a “Go invisible” feature that is more useful and intuitive.
• The right sidebar now displays user status messages by default, with an optional compact design available.
• The public access option was enhanced to skip the login page by default, support switching themes and languages, and add many other UI improvements.
• Incoming webhook integrations now support filtering which classes of events are sent into Zulip; this can be invaluable when the third-party service doesn’t support configuring which events to send to Zulip.
• Added support for Ubuntu 22.04.
• Removed support for Debian 10 and PostgreSQL 10 due to their approaching end-of-life upstream.
• New integrations: Azure DevOps, RhodeCode, wekan.

Full feature changelog

• Redesigned the message actions popover to be better organized.
• Redesigned moving messages to have a cleaner, more consistent UI that is no longer combined with the message editing UI. One can now choose to send automated notices when moving messages within a stream, not only between streams.
• Redesigned full user profiles to have a cleaner look and also display user IDs, which can be important when using the API. Users can now administer bot stream subscriptions from the bot’s full profile.
• Redesigned the gear menu to display basic details about the Zulip organization, server, and its version.
• Redesigned several organization settings pages to have more consistent design.
• Redesigned the footer for self-hosted Zulip servers. The footer now has just a few key links, rather than being almost identical to the footer for the zulip.com website.
• Redesigned the 500 error pages for self-hosted Zulip servers to be clearer and link to the Zulip server troubleshooting guide.
• Redesigned the interface for configuring message editing and deletion permissions to be easier to understand.
• Added support for emoji added in unicode versions since 2017, which had previously been unavailable in Zulip. Users using the deprecated “Google blobs” emoji set are automatically migrated to the modern “Google” emoji set. The “Google blobs” emoji set remains available for users who prefer it, with any new emoji that were added to the Unicode standard since 2017 displayed in the modern “Google” style.
• Added support for changing the role of bots in the UI; previously, this was only possible via the API.
• Added confirmation modals for various destructive actions, such as deactivating bots.
• Added new summary statistics on the organization analytics page. Fixed several bugs with the display of analytics graphs.
• Added support for administrators sending a final email to a user as part of deactivating their Zulip account.
• Added API endpoint to get a single stream by ID.
• Added beta support for user groups to have subgroups, and for some permissions settings to be managed using user groups. Over the coming releases, we plan to migrate all Zulip permissions settings to be based on this more flexible groups-based system. We currently expect this migration to be fully backwards-compatible.
• Added a new compliance export management command.
• Zulip’s automated emails use the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header to reduce auto-responder replies.
• Changed various icons to be more intuitive. The bell-based icon for muted topics has been replaced by a more standard muted speaker icon.
• Reworked how a new user’s language is set to prefer their browser’s configured language over the organization’s configured language. This organization-level setting has been renamed to “Language for automated messages and invitation emails” to reflect what it actually does following this change.
• Organized the Drafts panel to prioritize drafts matching the current view.
• Added an automated notification to the “stream events” topic when changing a stream’s privacy settings.
• Added support for conveniently overriding the default rate-limiting rules.
• Improved the search typeahead to show profile pictures for users.
• Improved typeahead matching algorithm for stream/user/emoji names containing multiple spaces and other corner cases.
• Improved the help center, including better display of keyboard shortcuts, mobile documentation for common workflows and many polish improvements.
• Improved API documentation, including a new page on roles and permissions, an audit to correct missing Changes entries, and new documentation for several previously undocumented endpoints.
• Improved Python static type-checking to make use of Django stubs for mypy, fixing many minor bugs in the process.
• Improved RealmAuditLog to cover several previously unauditable changes.
• Improved the experience for users who have not logged in for a long time, and receive an email or push notification about a private message or personal mention. These users are now automatically soft reactivated at the time of the notification, for a smoother experience when they log in.
• Improved the Tornado server-to-client push system’s sharding system to support realm regular expressions and experimental support for splitting a single realm across multiple push server processes.
• Improved user deactivation modal to provide details about bots and invitations that will be disabled.
• Improve matching algorithm for left sidebar stream filtering.
• Improved several integrations, including CircleCI, Grafana, Harbor, NewRelic, and the Slack compatible incoming webhook. Git webhooks now use a consistent algorithm for choosing shortened commit IDs to display.
• Improved mention typeahead and rendering for cases where mention syntax appears next to symbols.
• Improved browser window titles used by the app to be clearer.
• Improved the language in message notification emails explaining why the notification was sent.
• Improved interface for accessing stream email addresses.
• Reordered the organization settings panels to be more intuitive.
• Increased timeout for processing slow requests from 20s to 60s.
• Removed the “user list in left sidebar in narrow windows” setting.
• Removed limits that prevented replying to Zulip email notifications multiple times or, several days after receiving them.
• Fixed numerous bugs and performance issues with the Rocket.Chat data import tool. Improved importing emoji from Slack.
• Fixed several bugs where drafts could fail to be saved.
• Fixed a bug where copy-paste would incorrectly copy an entire message.
• Fixed the app’s main loading page to not suggest reloading until several seconds have passed.
• Fixed multiple bugs that could cause the web app to flood the server with requests after the computer wakes up from suspend.
• Fixed a bug where public streams imported from other chat systems could incorrectly be configured as public streams without shared history, a configuration not otherwise possible in Zulip.
• Fixed several subtle bugs involving editing custom profile field configuration.
• Fixed several bugs involving compose box keyboard shortcuts.
• Fixed dozens of settings UI interaction design bugs.
• Fixed subtle caching bugs in the URL preview system.
• Fixed several rare race conditions in the server implementation.
• Fixed many CSS corner cases issues involving content overflowing containers.
• Fixed entering an emoji in the mobile web app using an emoji keyboard.
• Fixed Enter being processed incorrectly when inputting a character into Zulip phonetically via an IME composing session.
• Fixed several subtle bugs with confirmation links.
• Fixed a subtle performance issue for full-text search for uncommon words.
• Fixed the estimator for the size of public data exports.
• Fixed “mark all as read” requiring a browser reload.
• Major improvements to our documentation for setting up the development environment and for joining the project as a new contributor.
• Extracted several JavaScript modules to share code with the mobile app.
• Replaced several Python linters with Ruff, an incredibly fast Python linter written in Rust.
• Upgraded many third-party dependencies including Django 4.1, and substantially modernized the Python codebase.

Upgrade notes for 6.0

• Installations using [docker-zulip][docker-zulip] will need to upgrade Postgres before upgrading to Zulip 6.0, because the previous default of Postgres 10 is no longer supported by this release.
• Installations using the AzureAD authentication backend will need to update /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf after upgrading. The azure_oauth2_secret secret was renamed to social_auth_azuread_oauth2_secret, to match our other external authentication methods.
• This release contains an expensive migration, 0419_backfill_message_realm, which adds data to a new realm column in the message table. Expect it to run for 10-15 minutes per million messages in the database. The new column is not yet used in this release, so this migration can be run in the background for installations hoping to avoid extended downtime.
• Custom profile fields with “Pronouns” in their name and the “short text” field type were converted to the new “Pronouns” field type.