# Status and availability

Status and availability let your teammates know roughly how quickly you'll
be responding to messages.

A **status** is a customizable message visible to all team members. A
typical status might be "in a meeting", "on vacation", or "visiting SF next week".

Your **availability** is a colored dot (like <span class="indicator green solid"></span>)
that indicates if you're currently active on Zulip, idle,
offline, or unavailable. If you're not current active, Zulip also lets your
teammates know when you were last active.

## Set a status

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1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.

1. Click the down chevron (<i class="fa fa-chevron-down"></i>) to the right.

1. Click **Set a status message**.

1. Set a status messages and click **Save**.

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You can view anyone else's status by hovering over their name in the left or
right sidebar, or by clicking their name or avatar in the main message feed. If
they haven't set a status, no status will appear.

## About availability

There are four possible availabilities:

* **Active** (<span class="indicator green solid"></span>): Zulip is open and in
  focus on web, desktop or mobile, or was in the last 140 seconds.

* **Idle** (<span class="indicator orange"></span>): Zulip is open on your
  computer (either desktop or web), but you are not active.

* **Offline** (<span class="indicator grey"></span>): Zulip is not open on
  your computer.

* **Unavailable** (<span class="indicator grey-line"></span>): You can always
  manually set your availability to unavailable.

For [Group PMs](/help/private-messages), a green circle
(<span class="indicator green solid"></span>)
means all users in the group are active. A pale green circle (<span
class="indicator green"></span>) means that some are active and some are
not. A white circle (<span class="indicator grey"></span>) means that none
are active.

You can see when someone was last active by hovering over their name in the
left or right sidebar.

## Set yourself as unavailable

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1. Hover over your name in the right sidebar.

1. Click the down chevron (<i class="fa fa-chevron-down"></i>) to the right.

1. Click **Set yourself as unavailable**.

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This will also obscure whether you were recently active.
