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Archive a channel

This feature is only available to organization owners and administrators.

You can archive channels you no longer plan to use. Archiving a channel:

  • Removes it from the left sidebar for all users.
  • Prevents new messages from being sent to the channel.
  • Prevents messages in the channel from being edited, deleted, or moved.

Archiving a channel does not remove subscribers, or change who can access it. Messages in archived channels still appear in search results, the combined feed, and recent conversations.

To hide the content in a channel, you can make it private and unsubscribe users from it prior to archiving.

Archive a channel

Channels can be unarchived only by contacting support for organizations hosted on Zulip Cloud, or by your self-hosted server's administrator.

  • Desktop/Web

  1. Click on the gear () icon in the upper right corner of the web or desktop app.

  2. Select Channel settings.

  3. Click All channels in the upper left.

  4. Select a channel.

  5. Click the archive () icon in the upper right corner of the channel settings panel.

  6. Approve by clicking Confirm.

You can also hover over a channel in the left sidebar, click on the ellipsis (), and select Channel settings to access settings for the channel.

Unarchiving archived channels

Zulip Cloud organizations that need to unarchive a channel can contact Zulip support.

If you are self-hosting, you can unarchive an archived channel using the unarchive_channel management command. This will restore it as a private channel with shared history, and subscribe all organization owners to it.

Don't see an answer to your question? Contact this Zulip server's administrators for support.