user pill shows current avatar/displayname instead of what it was at the time the message was sent

[uhoreg]

e.g., when I went into #dendrite-dev today, I saw:

because hfinch changed their displayname to Finch and set their avatar later on. It looks a bit confusing since Kegan is talking to Finch with a blue avatar, and hfinch with an orange avatar is responding. I would expect the pill to show the displayname and avatar from the time that the message was sent, rather than their current values.

Version information

• Platform: web

For the web app:

• Browser: Chromium
• OS: Debian
• URL: riot.im/develop (ec6efd2-react-d7f4e7c8c089-js-d8f486fc0d06)

[lukebarnard1]

FTR a quick roll-over currently lets you know who Finch is. But we could go and find the member event prior to the mention in the timeline and use the avatar/displayname there instead of the using the current avatar/displayname.

[lampholder]

Flagging P1 just to highlight the urgency with which we should think about this (we might decide that we're not going to change this behaviour now, but it does require a decision).

@lukebarnard1 - how invasive and labour-intensive is the approach you mention above?

[lukebarnard1]

how invasive and labour-intensive is the approach you mention above?

Well the naive implementation would take the previous member event in the client's timeline when pillifying. It would have to fall back on the current one if said event hasn't been paginated in?

[uhoreg]

Surely the necessary information must be available somewhere, since it's already displayed in the timeline.

[lukebarnard1]

The current member information is available. I'm not sure if we strictly have access to historical member events.

[krombel]

The user name at the point of writing the message can as well be optained by the message itself.
The pill creates following formatted_body:

"formatted_body": "<a href=\"https://matrix.to/#/@userid:domain.tld\">displayname</a>: message",

So "displayname" gets defined on message send and can therefore be used to get the displayname of that point in time.

[t3chguy]

fwiw, no point doing this since the avatar and displayname left/above of the event already has historical state, so something is obviously tracking this on a event by event basis
your soln would offer only a quick hacky fix for displaynames but nothing for avatars

[lukebarnard1]

So "displayname" gets defined on message send and can therefore be used to get the displayname of that point in time.

We want to avoid the abuse vector here as much as possible (i.e. a sender who sends something other than the user's current displayname). The easiest way to do this is to replace it entirely with something we can trust.

something is obviously tracking this on a event by event basis

Indeed, we just need the last event sent by the user before the mention.

[turt2live]

if someone heads out to fix this, note that there's a labs flag which wants this behaviour: matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#7815