Direct chat with a friend's Bot: held line looks already sent, approval box detached and late, no waiting state, stale badge (regression of #166 in DMs) #226

Environment

Found by self-test on 38c00b40f0c3e6193c7a8abcfb7aad25673f40f7 (main after #217; core, plugins/social, plugins/tree) on @deepseek-ai/dsh@0.2.0-rc.2, Node 24. Two fresh installs on one Linux box: A :3080 (owner SelfA0333, @selfa0333.home, Bots Chief + Helper), B :3081 (owner SelfB0333, @selfb0333.home, Chief). Bot Social https://47-80-69-220.sslip.io. Scheduled product self-test in the browser, 2026-10-18 03:37–03:43 Asia/Shanghai. No model key in this run, so Bot replies were not tested. Screenshots were not saved; screens are described in text.

Repro

1. A: Helper → Settings → Sharing → invite link. B: + → Add friend → paste → Accept invite (Talk through Chief). Helper shows in B's main list with the Friend's Bot marker.
2. B: open Helper (A's Bot, granted to B) and send Hello Helper, this is B testing.
3. Watch B's chat, B's sidebar and A for about 30 s. Then click Approve on B.

Actual

• The line looks sent. It shows at once as a normal black sent bubble on the right. There is no held style (dashed/faded) and no "waiting" marker on the bubble.
• The approval is late and detached. 10–15 s later a separate box appears above B's composer, not attached to the bubble: Waiting for approval / Chief → Helper / the text / Approve · Always approve · Reject.
• The other side sees nothing. A (Helper's owner, the receiver) shows no waiting state at any time.
• Badge is stale after Approve. The box changes to Approved, but B's sidebar row keeps Helper · SelfA0333's Bot with the ? badge and the label "Waiting for your approval" for a while after that.

Expected (owner design: in-chat approval)

• A held line is shown as held in the chat right away: the bubble itself has the pending style, and the Approve / Always approve / Reject controls are attached to it (owner only).
• The other side sees a waiting state for the held line.
• After Approve or Reject, the bubble turns into a normal sent line (or a rejected note) and the sidebar badge clears at once.
• This is the direct-chat version of Social UI polish: friend settings shell, approval affordances, face-room copy (aesthetics/usability) #166 item 3 ("Held outgoing line looks already sent"), which fix(social): plain face-room lines do not start Bot turns; UI polish (#167, #166) #168 fixed for face rooms only, so it is partly a regression of Social UI polish: friend settings shell, approval affordances, face-room copy (aesthetics/usability) #166 in direct chats with a friend's Bot.

Hunch (code read, not verified)

• core/src/client/user-message.js L120: held is computed only when room.origin === 'face-to-face'. A direct chat with a friend's Bot is not a face room, so the held bubble style never applies there.
• The card arrives on the approvals poll (list_approvals), not from the send result, which would explain the 10–15 s gap. The sidebar waiting flag seems to clear on a later poll rather than from the decide result.
• The receiver's waiting state needs a Bot Social server signal. + menu and sharing: duplicate Bot entries, per-Bot invite buried and clipped, own handle not shown (regression of #136) #181/Face-to-face: avatars and room title differ per home (regressions of #137/#172); Leave is abrupt and not seen by the peer #182 skipped it for that reason; it is still missing here.

Related

#166 / #168 (held bubble in face rooms), #179 (approval states wrong on both sides, face rooms), #114, #90. The Chief → Helper attribution is #227.