Available, Away and Do not disturb

Your status sits next to your name at the bottom of the sidebar. It decides whether chats are offered to you.

Available

You are working and you want chats. New conversations reach you, and you are counted as somebody who can answer.

Away

You are not at your desk. You are not told about new conversations.

Use it for lunch, the school run and the end of the day. It is not a statement about anything except whether you are there.

Do not disturb

You are at your desk and concentrating on something else.

Functionally close to away, and the difference is for your colleagues rather than for Talkfront: away reads as “gone”, do not disturb reads as “here, but do not”. On a team that matters, because one invites somebody to cover for you and the other invites them to wait.

What none of them do

They do not close your open conversations. Anything assigned to you stays assigned. If you are going away for more than an hour, hand your live chats over rather than relying on your status.

They do not change what customers see. That is your website’s opening hours, which is a separate setting. A visitor is told you are online if the website says you are open, regardless of who happens to be available at that second.

Setting it automatically

Settings → Availability lets you keep a rota, so you go available and away at the edges of your shifts without remembering to.

Changing your status by hand always wins until the next shift starts or ends. Stepping out at half past nine sticks, and tomorrow morning the schedule takes over again.

If everyone is away

Chats still arrive and still wait. Nobody is notified, so they sit until somebody opens the panel. This is the most common reason a workspace finds a day-old conversation: not that nobody cared, but that everybody was marked away.

Last updated 22 September 2026.