Stream: Zulip
Topic: Web-public streams
Josh Mandel (Mar 29 2022 at 21:22):
Congrats on the 5.0 release @Tim Abbott and team! Looking at settings for web-public streams (screenshot below), the "Allow creating" checkbox is disabled (i.e., I cannot turn the feature on). It would be great to try this feature as a way to offer a better user experience than https://chat-archive.fhir.org. Is there a setting in the hosting config that needs to be flipped for us, or am I misunderstanding the instructions at https://zulip.com/help/web-public-streams#enable-or-disable-web-public-streams ?
Tim Abbott (Mar 29 2022 at 22:12):
@Josh Mandel yeah, we're currently doing it opt-in for Zulip Cloud; just email support@zulip.com with a request and it'll get enabled for you.
Josh Mandel (Mar 29 2022 at 23:37):
Awesome, thanks. Done :-)
Lee Surprenant (Apr 01 2022 at 11:35):
saw that josh made the #smart stream web-public...pretty cool. couple questions:
- I assume only admins can do that?
- Will that make the streams indexable by google? ...I feel like that could be a game-changer
Alya Abbott (Apr 01 2022 at 22:15):
Here's the detailed documentation for web-public streams: https://zulip.com/help/web-public-streams
- There is an organization setting for who can make streams web-public, but:
Only users in trusted roles (moderators and administrators) can be given permission to create web-public streams. This is intended to make it hard for an attacker to host malicious content in an unadvertised web-public stream in a legitimate organization.
- From the help page:
Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines.
We would like to add a search indexing option in the future, but it will be a significant engineering project to do so.
Josh Mandel (Apr 02 2022 at 22:03):
In theory today FHIR's public streams can be indexed by Google based on https://chat-archive.fhir.org -- but the Google crawler has not actually indexed this domain despite the domain's being registered with the Google search console for about a month. I have not debugged this. Also there are some issues with topic names that include check marks that I have not invested the time to fix because web public streams are a much nicer solution ;-))
Josh Mandel (Apr 02 2022 at 22:03):
@Alya Abbott I noticed that the current beta still requires users to click a pseudo-login button when viewing a web public stream. Is the plan to remove this step once the beta has reached some level of maturity?
Alya Abbott (Apr 05 2022 at 21:41):
Ah, we hadn't been planning on removing the login page step, but that's a great idea! I filed https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21690, and I expect we'll address it before the public launch.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
