Zulip - 6.0

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.