5.0 -- 2022-03-29

Highlights

• New resolve topic feature allows marking topics as ✔ completed. It’s a lightweight way to manage a variety of workflows, including support interactions, answering questions, and investigating issues.
• Administrators may enable the option to create web-public streams. Web-public streams can be viewed by anyone on the Internet without creating an account in your organization.
• Users can now select a status emoji alongside their status message. Status emoji are shown next to the user's name in the sidebars, message feed, and compose box. Animated status emoji will only animate on hover.
• Redesigned the compose box, adding formatting buttons for bold, italics and links as well as visual improvements. New button for inserting global times into your message.
• Redesigned "Stream settings" to be much more usable, with separate tabs for personal settings, global settings, and membership, and more consistent style with the rest of Zulip's settings.
• Stream creation was redesigned with a much cleaner interface, especially for selecting initial subscribers.
• Redesigned "Full user profile" widget to show the user's stream and user group subscriptions. Administrators can unsubscribe a user from streams directly from their full profile.
• Reorganized personal and organization settings to have clearer labels and make it easier to find privacy settings.
• Organization administrators can now configure the default personal preference settings for new users joining the organization.
• Most permissions settings now support choosing which roles have the permission, rather than just allowing administrators or everyone.
• Permanent links to conversations now correctly redirect if the target message has been moved to a new stream or topic.
• Added a data import tool for migrating from Rocket.Chat. Mattermost data import now supports importing uploaded files.
• Improved handling of messages containing many images; now up to 20 images can be previewed in a single message (up from 5), and a new grid layout will be used.
• OpenID Connect joins SAML, LDAP, Google, GitHub, Azure Active Directory, and more as a supported Single Sign-On provider.
• SAML authentication now supports syncing custom profile fields. Additionally, SAML authentication now supports automatic account creation and IdP-initiated logout.
• Added SCIM integration for synchronizing accounts with an external user database.
• Added support for installation on ARM platforms (including Mac M1).
• Removed support for Ubuntu 18.04, which no longer receives upstream security support for key Zulip dependencies.

Upgrade notes for 5.0

• This release contains a migration, 0009_confirmation_expiry_date_backfill, that can take several minutes to run on a server with millions of messages of history.
• The TERMS_OF_SERVICE and PRIVACY_POLICY settings have been removed in favor of a system that supports additional policy documents, such as a code of conduct. See the updated documentation for the new system.

Full feature changelog

• Timestamps in Zulip messages are now permanent links to the message in its thread.
• Added support for invitation links with configurable expiry, including links that never expire. Deactivating a user now disables all invitations that the user had sent.
• Added support for expanding the compose box to be full-screen.
• Added support for filtering events in webhooks.
• Added support for overriding Zulip's defaults for new users in your organization.
• Added support for referring to a user group with a silent mention.
• Added new personal privacy setting controlling whether typing notifications are sent to other users.
• Added new personal setting controlling whether Esc navigates the user to the default view.
• Split stream creation policy into separate settings for private, public, and web-public streams.
• New integrations: Freshstatus, Lidarr, Open Collective, Radarr, Sonarr, SonarQube.
• Message edit notifications now indicate how many messages were moved, when only part of a topic was moved.
• Muted topic records are now moved when an entire topic is moved.
• Search views that don't mark messages as read now have an explanatory notice if any unread messages are present.
• Added new "Scroll to bottom" widget hovering over the message feed.
• Changed the default emoji set from Google Classic to Google Modern.
• User groups mentions now correctly function as silent mentions when inside block quotes.
• Messages that have been moved (but not otherwise edited) are now displayed as MOVED, not EDITED.
• Reworked the UI for selecting a stream when moving topics.
• Redesigned modals in the app to have more consistent and cleaner UX.
• Added new topic filter widget in left sidebar zoomed view.
• Redesigned Welcome Bot onboarding experience.
• Redesigned hover behavior for timestamps and time mentions.
• Messages sent by muted users can now be rehidden after being revealed. One can also now mute deactivated users.
• Rewrote Help Center guides for new organizations and users, and made hundreds of other improvements to Help Center content and organization.
• Reimplemented the image lightbox's pan/zoom functionality to be nicer, allowing us to enable it be default.
• Added styled loading page for the web application.
• Webhook integrations now support specifying the target stream by ID.
• Notifications now differentiate user group mentions from personal mentions.
• Added support for configuring how long the server should wait before sending email notifications after a mention or PM.
• Improved integrations: BigBlueButton, GitHub, Grafana, PagerDuty, and many more.
• Improved various interaction and performance details in Recent Topics.
• Improved styling for poll and todo list widgets.
• Zulip now supports configuring the database name and username when using a remote Postgres server. Previously, these were hardcoded to "zulip".
• Migrated many tooltips to prettier tooltips powered by TippyJS.
• Autocomplete is now available when editing topics.
• Typeahead for choosing a topic now consistently fetches the full set of historical topics in the stream.
• Changed "Quote and reply" to insert quoted content at the cursor when the compose box is not empty.
• The compose box now has friendly UI for messages longer than 10K characters.
• Compose typeahead now opens after typing only "@".
• Improved the typeahead sorting for choosing code block languages.
• Many additional subtle usability improvements to compose typeahead.
• Adjusted permissions to only allow administrators to override unicode emoji with a custom emoji of the same name.
• New "Manage this user" option in user profile popovers simplifies moderation.
• New automated notifications when changing global stream settings like description and message retention policy.
• Drafts are now advertised more prominently, in the left sidebar.
• Drafts and message edit history now correctly render widgets like spoilers and global times.
• Improved the tooltip formatting for global times.
• LDAP userAccountControl logic now supports FreeIPA quirks.
• Fixed a problem where self-hosted servers that permuted the IDs of their users by using the data export/import tools might send mobile push notifications to the wrong devices.
• Fixed various bugs resulting in missing translations; most importantly in the in-application search/markdown/hotkeys help widgets.
• Fixed several bugs that prevented browser undo from working in the compose box.
• Fixed search typeahead not working once you've added a full-text keyword.
• Fixed linkifier validation to prevent invalid linkifiers.
• Fixed Ctrl+. shortcut not working correctly with empty topics.
• Fixed numerous corner case bugs with email and mobile push notifications.
• Fixed a bug resulting in long LaTeX messages failing to render.
• Fixed buggy logic displaying users' last active time.
• Fixed confusing "delete stream" language for archiving streams.
• Fixed exceptions in races involving messages being deleted while processing a request to add emoji reactions, mark messages as read, or sending notifications.
• Fixed most remaining 500 errors seen in Zulip Cloud (these were already quite rare, so this process involved debugging several rare races, timeouts, and error handling bugs.).
• Fixed subtle bugs involving composing messages to deactivated users.
• Fixed subtle bugs with reloading the page while viewing settings with "Recent topics" as the default view.
• Fixed bug where pending email notifications could be lost when restarting the Zulip server.
• Fixed "require topics" setting not being enforced for API clients.
• Fixed several subtle Markdown rendering bugs.
• Fixed several bugs with message edit history and stream/topic moves.
• Fixed multiple subtle bugs that could cause compose box content to not be properly saved as drafts in various situations.
• Fixed several server bugs involving rare race conditions.
• Fixed a bug where different messages in search results would be incorrectly shown with a shared recipient bar despite potentially not being temporally adjacent.
• Fixed lightbox download button not working with the S3 upload backend.
• Increased default retention period before permanently removing deleted messages from 7 days to 30 days.
• Rate limiting now supports treating all Tor exit nodes as a single IP.
• Changed "From" header in invitation emails to no longer include the name of the user who sent the invitation, to prevent anti-phishing software from flagging invitations.
• Added support for uploading animated PNGs as custom emoji.
• Renamed "Night mode" to "Dark theme".
• Added the mobile app's notification sound to desktop sound options, as "Chime".
• Reworked the manage.py help interface to hide Django commands that are useless or harmful to run on a production system. Also deleted several useless management commands.
• Improved help and functionality of several management commands. New create_realm management command supports some automation workflows.
• Added RealmAuditLog logging for most administrative actions that were previously not tracked.
• Added automated testing of the upgrade process from previous releases, to reduce the likelihood of problems upgrading Zulip.
• Attempting to "upgrade" to an older version now gives a clear error message.
• Optimized critical parts of the message sending code path for large organizations.
• Optimized creating streams in very large organizations.
• Certain unprintable Unicode characters are no longer permitted in topic names.
• Added IP-based rate limiting for unauthenticated requests.
• Added documentation for Zulip's rate-limiting rules.
• Merged the API endpoints for a user's personal settings into the /settings endpoint with a cleaner interface.
• The server API now supports marking messages as unread, allowing this upcoming mobile app feature to work with Zulip 5.0.
• Added to the API most page-load parameters used by the web app application that were missing from the /register API.
• Simplified the infrastructure for rendering API documentation so that only a few pages require Markdown templates in addition to the OpenAPI specification file.
• Corrected many minor issues with the API documentation.
• Major improvements to both the infrastructure and content for Zulip's ReadTheDocs documentation for contributors and sysadmins.
• Major improvements to the mypy type-checking, discovered via using the django-stubs project to get Django stubs.
• Renamed main branch from master to main.