Guest users
You can add users who should have restricted access to your organization as
guests. For example, this may be a good choice for contractors or customers
invited to a company's Zulip chat.
Guest users can:
- View and send messages in channels they have been added to, including viewing
message history in the same way as other channel subscribers.
Guest users cannot:
- See private or public channels, unless they have been specifically added to the channel.
- Create new channels or user groups.
- Add or manage bots.
- Add custom emoji.
- Invite users to join the organization.
You can also configure other permissions for guest users, such as whether they
can:
Zulip Cloud plans have special discounted
pricing for guest users.
-
Click on the gear () icon in the upper
right corner of the web or desktop app.
-
Select Organization settings.
-
On the left, click Organization permissions.
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Under Guests, toggle Display “(guest)” after names of guest users.
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Click Save changes.
Zulip Cloud customers who wish to use this feature must upgrade to
the Zulip Cloud Plus plan.
You can restrict guests' ability to see other users in the organization. If you
do so, guests will be able to see information about other users only in the
following cases:
- The user belongs to a direct message thread with the
guest.
- The user is subscribed to one or more channels with
the guest.
When a guest cannot see information about a user, the guest's experience will be
that:
- The user does not appear in the right sidebar.
- The user does not appear in typeahead suggestions, e.g., in the compose box
and search.
- Otherwise, such a user will be displayed as an Unknown user in the Zulip
app. For example, messages and reactions from a former subscriber of a channel
will be shown as from an Unknown user.
- An Unknown user's user card will not display
information about that user. However, the guest can still search from all
messages send by a particular Unknown user from that user's card.
In practice, guests should rarely encounter content from an Unknown user,
unless users in your organization frequently change their channel subscriptions
or are deactivated.
The only information guests can access about unknown users via the API
is which user IDs exist, and
availability updates for each user ID.
Self-hosted organizations can disable API access to availability updates
by configuring
CAN_ACCESS_ALL_USERS_GROUP_LIMITS_PRESENCE = True. For performance reasons,
this is recommended only for organizations with up to ~100 users.
-
Click on the gear () icon in the upper
right corner of the web or desktop app.
-
Select Organization settings.
-
On the left, click Organization permissions.
-
Under Guests, configure Who can view all other users in the
organization.
-
Click Save changes.
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