Details on this zulip instance

Stream: general

[Andrew Helwer]

Hello! I am involved in the TLA+ community and we are looking at using Zulip. I have some questions if you have time:

• Is this instance hosted on the free plan or the $6.67/user/month plan? Or is it self-hosted?
• How do you deal with transient users who post a couple times then never again? The zulip website says you can deactivate them manually, is there a way to automate that to reduce costs?
• Do you use any backup method to duplicate the chats for posterity?

We are looking at switching to a zulip/mailing list community setup, similar to Isabelle. Any other feedback or accounts of experiences with this would also be appreciated!

[Alex J. Best]

According to https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/plans/ we are on the standard cloud plan, which would be $6.67 per user month, but we are sponsored by Zulip (I guess as research/open source) so it is free to the community. (maybe someone more in the know can confirm this)

[Alex J. Best]

If you click the cog icon in the top right (in the app) it should show you which plan a given instance is on.

[Eric Wieser]

According to https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/stats we have 6909 users, which would cost us half a million dollars a year if we were paying!

[Jireh Loreaux]

Ha! I had always assumed we were self-hosted!

[Mario Carneiro]

@Andrew Helwer Regarding the other questions:

How do you deal with transient users who post a couple times then never again? The zulip website says you can deactivate them manually, is there a way to automate that to reduce costs?

We don't do anything about said users, since as mentioned above they are not a drag on our funding.

Do you use any backup method to duplicate the chats for posterity?

We have https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ generated by https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive (which used to be just for lean but was moved to zulip org), but we have had some issues with using github to host the archive and as a result I believe it is currently frozen.

[Eric Wieser]

We don't actually use https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive, as this discarded some styling features we were using and broke all our historical URLs. We were previously using https://github.com/robertylewis/zulip-archive, but this didn't play well with github hosting.

[Eric Wieser]

We're currently using https://github.com/eric-wieser/zulip-archive/tree/better-action which forks Rob Lewis's action, but running it manually.