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Zulip help center

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 Notification Bot indicating that you resolved the topic. Users can configure whether these notices are automatically marked as read.
  • 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 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 or unresolve a topic if they have permission to do so.

Mark a topic as resolved

Section titled “Mark a topic as resolved”
  1. Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.
  2. Click on the ellipsis ( ).
  3. Select Mark as resolved.

Mark a topic as unresolved

Section titled “Mark a topic as unresolved”

Marking a topic as unresolved normally triggers an automated notice from 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.

  1. Hover over a topic in the left sidebar.
  2. Click on the ellipsis ( ).
  3. Select Mark as unresolved.

Search for messages in unresolved topics

Section titled “Search for messages in unresolved topics”
  1. Click the search (Search) icon in the top bar to open the search box.
  2. Type -is:resolved, or start typing and select Exclude topics marked as resolved from the typeahead.
  3. (optional) Enter additional search terms or filters.
  4. Press Enter.

Search for messages in resolved topics

Section titled “Search for messages in resolved topics”
  1. Click the search (Search) icon in the top bar to open the search box.
  2. Type is:resolved, or start typing and select Topics marked as resolved from the typeahead.
  3. (optional) Enter additional search terms or filters.
  4. Press Enter.

Filter by whether topics are resolved

Section titled “Filter by whether topics are resolved”
  1. Click on a channel in the left sidebar.
  2. Click show all topics at the bottom of the list of recent topics in the selected channel.
  3. In the search box at the top of the list of topics, type is:.
  4. Choose unresolved or resolved from the typeahead suggestions.

Configure whether resolved topic notices are marked as read

Section titled “Configure whether resolved topic notices are marked as read”

Zulip lets you automatically mark as read Notification Bot notices indicating that someone resolved or unresolved a topic, or do so just for topics you don’t follow.

  1. Go to Notifications.
  2. Under Topic notifications, configure Automatically mark resolved topic notices as read.

Sending messages to resolved topics

Section titled “Sending messages to resolved topics”

You can send messages to a resolved topic, which is handy for “thank you” messages, or to discuss whether a topic was incorrectly marked as resolved.

When a topic is resolved or unresolved, users’ compose boxes and message views automatically update to show the topic’s current state. This helps make sure everyone sends messages to the correct place.

Integrations will still send messages to the original topic after a topic is resolved. This is useful for alerting integrations, where a repeating alert might have a different cause. As usual, you can mark the topic resolved once you’ve investigated the situation.

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