A member's cached group card could stay stale for the lifetime of a long-running
bot: nothing refreshes it on a card change (no push), and the member-list refetch
only fires on join/leave/admin events (+60s TTL), never periodically — so a quiet
group freezes at warmup. get_group_msg_history / live events then showed an empty
or outdated sender.card even though the current card was in the message.
Every group message carries the sender's current display name in grp.memberCard
(field 4 = group card if set, else base nickname). The group decoder now prefers
it over the possibly-stale cache when it differs from the base nickname (a real
group card); and packet-pipeline self-heals it back into the in-memory member
cache, gated so it writes only on an actual change. This keeps active members'
cards fresh for all cache consumers off message traffic alone — no extra fetch,
no rate-limit exposure. Verified on-target: a member's card change now reflects
in the next message without a member-list refetch.
Known, accepted edge: a member changing only their base nickname (no card) is
mislabeled as a card until the next member-list refetch corrects it — field 4
alone can't distinguish the two, and the mislabeled value is still the member's
own current name.
DrSmoothl
007dfaf6e2