Rename "(no topic)" to "general chat"

[alya]

In zulip/zulip#23291, we plan to rename "(no topic)" to "general chat". This is expected to require some work to support on mobile, but the details of that are TBD pending design decisions that have not been finalized yet.

References

• #api design
• #design, for user/product motivation and UX choices
• Web app / server issue: Rename "(no topic)" to "general chat" zulip#23291
• zulip-flutter issue: Handle no-topic topic ("general chat") zulip-flutter#1250

[gnprice]

This feature appears to be landing in the upcoming Zulip Server 10, and will be one of the headline features there. So it'll be one of the few features we build for this legacy app.

I think the plan I'd like to pursue is to develop the feature first in zulip-flutter (zulip/zulip-flutter#1250), because development is more efficient in the Flutter app. Then when we've worked out all the questions there about what's involved and how the feature should work, we can port the changes over to this codebase.

This remains a task for the core team; we aren't able to spend time helping people work with the legacy codebase. For anyone interested in contributing to Zulip, see the zulip-flutter repo's README and Zulip's guide to contributing:
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/contributing.html

[gnprice]

A few weeks ago we decided to skip building the Zulip Server 10 features for this legacy app. We're proceeding with implementing them in the new Flutter-based app (e.g. zulip/zulip-flutter#1250 for this "general chat" feature), and so the way they reach users will be that we launch that new app in the next couple of months.

For this particular feature, it's changing how a core part of the Zulip model works (topics!), and so the compatibility story for existing clients is fairly complex. We did spend significant effort on designing a compatibility plan we expect to work — see the #api design thread — but I wanted to also validate empirically that when the existing client interacts with the feature, the UX is reasonable and things don't break.

The feature is now deployed on chat.zulip.org, and there are some threads there using it. So I just spent a few minutes using the app with those. As far as I saw, everything is fine — our compatibility plan worked.

Specifically, I tried:

• seeing a "test general chat" thread in the inbox
• seeing it amongst other threads in a channel narrow
• seeing it in the topic-list screen for a channel
• viewing it in a conversation narrow
• replying to it

Everything worked fine, just as if it were a normal thread with the name "test general chat". (Which is the value of realm_empty_topic_display_name that chat.zulip.org currently has, while the feature is experimental.)

So I think there's nothing more we need to do for this feature in the legacy app.