Zulip Chat Archive

Stream: Zulip meta

Topic: web public streams

Alya Abbott (Dec 02 2021 at 23:10):

Hi folks! We're getting close to rolling out a beta version of web public streams, i.e. a Zulip-native alternative to zulip-archive. We have documented this upcoming feature here, and would love to get some feedback.

  1. Is anything on the help page unclear/confusing?
  2. Do you have any questions about this feature that the help page fails to answer?
  3. Do you have any concerns about the way the feature is designed to work?
  4. Is there any key functionality that's missing?

Please feel free to respond here or on the Zulip development community discussion thread. Thanks!

Mario Carneiro (Dec 03 2021 at 02:58):

@Alya Abbott This is great news, we've been wanting this for a while. A question / feature request: If you are not logged in and follow a zulip-internal link to a web public stream like

It should redirect to the corresponding "archive" link. We have lots of these kinds of links in commit messages and blog posts where changing them is not feasible, but we would still like them to be resolved to the web public version for external users.

Rob Lewis (Dec 03 2021 at 03:42):

@Mario Carneiro not sure I follow, where are you seeing that web-public URLs are different from the ones we're used to?

Rob Lewis (Dec 03 2021 at 03:42):

If I missed that somewhere, then yes, definitely echoing Mario's request :smile:

Mario Carneiro (Dec 03 2021 at 03:42):

That's why it was half a question, I can't tell from the guide whether it is a different URL

Rob Lewis (Dec 03 2021 at 03:43):

Ah

Rob Lewis (Dec 03 2021 at 03:44):

I'm also curious if/what needs to be done to make web public streams indexable by search engines

Alya Abbott (Dec 03 2021 at 06:38):

Web-public URL will be the same as internal URLs, so the same links will work. That sounds like a great point to add to the documentation!

Alya Abbott (Dec 03 2021 at 06:38):

Rob Lewis said:

I'm also curious if/what needs to be done to make web public streams indexable by search engines

We haven't figured this one out yet at this point.

Alya Abbott (Dec 03 2021 at 06:39):

If anyone here happens to have expert knowledge about search engine indexing, let me know. ;)

Alya Abbott (Mar 02 2022 at 21:19):

Hi folks! I'm excited to announce that we should be ready to open up the web-public streams feature for beta-testing here in the next week or so. :)

Our plan is to give early access to a few organizations like this one so that we can iron out any glitches before releasing the feature to everyone on Zulip Cloud. If you happen to be part of another Zulip Cloud organization that would be interested in testing out web-public streams and providing feedback, please PM me to arrange it.

In the meantime, you can already check out the feature in the Zulip development community by clicking on "Access without an account (Beta)" on the chat.zulip.org login page.

Alya Abbott (Mar 02 2022 at 23:41):

Alya Abbott said:

Rob Lewis said:

I'm also curious if/what needs to be done to make web public streams indexable by search engines

We haven't figured this one out yet at this point.

Also, at this point we have clarified that web-public streams will not be indexable by search engines. It would be a significant project to make them indexable (or add that as an option), so that will probably happen at some point, but definitely not right away.

Alya Abbott (Mar 14 2022 at 18:40):

Hi folks! The web-public streams feature is now available in this organization! Streams can be set to web-public visibility once an administrator enables web-public streams. You should also check to make sure you're happy with the set of roles that can create web-public streams.

In order to find and fix any remaining issues, we have so far enabled this feature for a very small number of organizations. Please share feedback about any problems you see, big or small!

Sebastian Ullrich (Mar 14 2022 at 20:01):

Great! I've made #general web-public, as a start. If everything looks good, we can change the other public streams as well, it's just a few...

Sebastian Ullrich (Mar 14 2022 at 20:01):

Nice, looks like someone else is doing that work for me :)

Mario Carneiro (Mar 14 2022 at 20:05):

I moved the big streams: #general, #Is there code for X?, #lean4, #new members , #mathlib4 , #maths , #new members which are most likely to have useful messages that we want to link to publicly. I decided against making #Geographic locality web-public since it might be too personal for some folks (although anything posted there is already visible by 5000+ people).

Sebastian Ullrich (Mar 14 2022 at 20:06):

Sounds good to me

Alya Abbott (Apr 20 2022 at 18:38):

Hi folks! Any feedback on web-public streams so far?

We're working on a blog post for announcing that the feature is out of beta (sometime in May). So in addition to reporting issues/feature requests, positive quotes about web-public streams that could be shared are helpful too. :)

Please feel free to PM me if that's better for chatting about putting together a shareable quote.

Thanks!

Rob Lewis (Apr 21 2022 at 20:41):

@Alya Abbott as far as I can tell, the web-public streams are working as expected, which is great! It's definitely a big step up. And I'm grateful for all the work that went into it and don't mean to minimize the contribution. But I have to say I was a little disappointed by

Also, at this point we have clarified that web-public streams will not be indexable by search engines. It would be a significant project to make them indexable (or add that as an option), so that will probably happen at some point, but definitely not right away.

IMO getting the chat publicly indexed was a huge reason why we (I?) was looking forward to web-public streams. Public Gitter chats seem to be indexed, I still occasionally turn up the old Lean Gitter when I'm looking for things on Google. There's a ton of knowledge stored in this Zulip that's still hard to access even with the web-public streams.

Do you know what the challenges are that make this a significant project? Is there a discussion about it somewhere I could read? It's definitely out of my world and I don't think I could help with it myself but I'm curious.

Alya Abbott (Apr 21 2022 at 21:51):

I don't think there's a detailed discussion I can point you to, but I filed an issue to note a few major points and provide a convenient place for discussion/feedback: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881

More immediately, our short-term plan is to improve the zulip-archive integration: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21789

Kevin Buzzard (Apr 22 2022 at 13:37):

Am I right in thinking that I cannot link directly to a message, and users have to click through "Access without an account (beta)"?

Alya Abbott (Apr 22 2022 at 20:36):

That's the current situation, but will change as soon as https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/21850 is merged, which will happen before the feature is out beta.

Alya Abbott (May 05 2022 at 15:58):

Starting today, the public access option is out of beta! You can check out our blog post for details.

The biggest change since the initial beta version is that a link to a Zulip topic/message/etc. now takes you directly into the public access view, without having to click a button.

Alya Abbott (May 05 2022 at 15:58):

Retweets of the announcement are appreciated!

Mac (Jun 12 2022 at 16:22):

To whom it may concern, should #announce also be made web public?

Last updated: Dec 20 2023 at 11:08 UTC