As we head into the new year, we want to share some fun facts and highlights from 2022.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 6.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed to help people collaborate to solve any challenge. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous communication. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day.

On July 18, 2022, Slack announced that starting September 1, search history for organizations on Slack’s Free plan will be limited to just the past 90 days of message history. At first blush, this might look like a minor policy tweak. But it is in fact a dramatic change that makes Slack’s free plan untenable for many organizations, including ones that have been happily using Slack’s free plan for years.

Today, we’re delighted to announce the general availability of Zulip’s public access option. Open-source projects and other open communities can now offer one-click access (no login required!) to part or all of their Zulip chat. For those who are not familiar with it, Zulip is a modern team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. It is also a vibrant open-source project, developed by a values-focused organization.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 5.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day. Zulip’s 100% open-source software is available as a managed cloud service or a self-hosted solution.

An internal investigation recently uncovered a vulnerability (identified as CVE-2022-21706) in Zulip’s invitation links. Specifically, a reusable invitation link could be used to join a different organization than the one it was created for. As a result, there was a potential for users to join any organization without an invitation (and bypassing domain restrictions). This vulnerability was discovered by the Zulip security team, and has now been fixed for all Zulip Cloud organizations.

Quill, a team chat company with $16 million in venture capital funding, was acquired by Twitter and shut down their product last week. Users were given a mere four days to export their data prior to deletion; direct messages and private channels could not be exported at all. Our sympathies go out to Quill users, whose needs were given so little consideration in this deal.

This week, Discord teased plans to integrate a crypto asset wallet. After backlash from their user community, Discord clarified that the feature isn’t ready to ship “for now”. With many popular social and chat apps already on the blockchain bandwagon (including Facebook, Telegram, Signal, Twitter and Reddit), some are wondering whether Zulip might be next. The answer is no.

Zulip for Education is a new open source team chat product used at university departments around the world, including MIT, University of California San Diego and Technical University of Munich, Germany.

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 4.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that combines the best of email and chat to make remote work productive and delightful. Fortune 500 companies, leading open source projects, and thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day.