[ori_b]

I admit, I never used zulip -- I don't like using chat from the browser, so I generally stick to things that I can connect to from chat clients.

- What does it replace channels with?

- How does it keep my github account separate from the identity I'm using in chat?

- How does it avoid etiquette in channels?

- Does it let me ignore or mute annoying people?

- Is it possible to easily archive communication for posterity?

[dsr_]

Zulip uses three classes of communication: Streams which are like IRC channels; each stream has named threads (users are encouraged to reuse or start new ones as appropriate); and private messages can be 1:1 or multiparty.

Zulip doesn't do anything with github other than the regex-based integration -- you can create links more easily, that's it.

Nothing avoids etiquette or enforces etiquette except people.

Muting can be applied to people or named threads.

Zulip defaults to full archiving of everything, and making it searchable as well.

[ori_b]

> Nothing avoids etiquette or enforces etiquette except people.

So why is it listed as an IRC specific problem?

> Zulip defaults to full archiving of everything, and making it searchable as well.

I have IRC logs from dead networks dating from over 15 years ago, and I still sometimes look things up in them. I don't want to trust Zulip to survive 15 years.

[tabbott]

> I don't want to trust Zulip to survive 15 years.

You don't need to, we have an official tool that generates an HTML archive: https://github.com/zulip/zulip_archive. We recently adopted it from the great folks at the Lean Prover community, but we have plans to make it a lot nicer over the next couple months.

That said, one of Zulip's central technical design principles is to invest in making a codebase that is easy to understand, well-documented, and readable, with the goal of ensuring Zulip is able to thrive for the next 15 years and beyond.

I've been meaning to write a series of blog posts on the topic, but check out the 150K words of mostly Zulip developer-facing documentation on our ReadTheDocs:

https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/readme.html

[ori_b]

> Nothing avoids etiquette or enforces etiquette except people.

So why is it listed as an IRC specific problem?

> Zulip defaults to full archiving of everything, and making it searchable as well.

I have IRC logs from dead networks dating from over 15 years ago, and I still sometimes look things up in them. I don't want to trust Zulip to survive 15 years.

> Zulip doesn't do anything with github other than the regex-based integration

I see. The parent poster implied that there's no need to pick a username, and that he logs in with GitHub. That implied that it used your GitHub account name, since I don't see another way to enforce unique names.

[tabbott]

Zulip uses your full name as the primary identifier facing other users. Depending on the organization's configuration, a user's email address may or may not be available as well, but we just need your name (and auto-generated user ID) to display messages.

https://zulipchat.com/help/restrict-visibility-of-email-addr...