Group chat loses messages sent when I’m offline

[Hawk777]

I shut down Pidgin. Someone else sends a message to a group chat (“space”). I start Pidgin. The message doesn’t appear. Given that the most recent commit was 29 days ago, I believe I am running the head of master as of time of writing (b6b824a).

[rvdborgt]

This also happens with normal chats for me.

[Deledrius]

I have a contact for whom this has been a consistent issue now for at least a month as well, in ordinary 1:1 chats.

[Hawk777]

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to start looking into fixing this, if I had time to do so? Where would one even learn that part of Google’s protocol? Are the /api/ endpoints documented anywhere? Or do you reverse engineer them from the network requests sent by the web UI using browser debug tools? Or do you get the information from somewhere else?

[Hawk777]

There appears to be a documented API here, but this plugin appears not to be using it, I assume for a good reason.

[rvdborgt]

I'm afraid I won't be of much help fixing this (not being a programmer myself) but IMO this is currently the most annoying problem of the Google Chat plugin. I don't even need to be offline for messages to get lost. It also happens in a normal 1:1 chat while we're both online. Messages may come later (and then they're in the wrong order if I wrote something in between them) or not at all. The plugin is currently not reliable unfortunately, so I do hope someone will have some time diving into it.

[Hawk777]

There appears to be a documented API here, but this plugin appears not to be using it, I assume for a good reason.

The good reason is that that API only works for users in Google Workspaces (i.e. paid tier), not us ordinary plebs using Google Chat. It doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere reasonable AFAICT, but if you get a Google developer account and try to actually create an app and enable the official Google Chat API, you end up with a message in the app control panel saying so.

[r91085]

Also have this issue in normal chat, it misses some message from others and also did not send some meesages out from my side.....