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 filters.
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 channel. 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.
Mark a topic as resolved
-
Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.
-
Click on the ellipsis ().
-
Select Mark as resolved.
You can also click on the ✔ icon in the message recipient bar to
mark an unresolved topic as resolved.
-
Press and hold a topic until the long-press menu appears.
-
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
Marking a topic as unresolved normally triggers an automated notice from the
notification bot. However, unresolving a topic right after you resolved it
removes the original notice instead. This is helpful if you resolved a topic by
accident.
-
Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.
-
Click on the ellipsis ().
-
Select Mark as unresolved.
You can also click on the ✔ icon in the message recipient bar to
mark a resolved topic as unresolved.
-
Press and hold a topic until the long-press menu appears.
-
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.
Search for messages in unresolved topics
-
Click the search () icon in the top bar to open the search box.
-
Type -is:resolved, or start typing and select Exclude topics marked as
resolved from the typeahead.
-
(optional) Enter additional search terms or
filters.
-
Press Enter.
You can also use the / or Ctrl + K
keyboard shortcut to start searching messages.
To get a feed of unread messages in all unresolved topics, search for
is:unresolved is:unread.
Search for messages in resolved topics
-
Click the search () icon in the top bar to open the search box.
-
Type is:resolved, or start typing and select Topics marked as resolved
from the typeahead.
-
(optional) Enter additional search terms or
filters.
-
Press Enter.
You can also use the / or Ctrl + K
keyboard shortcut to start searching messages.
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.
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