WS heartbeats create rogue conversations from empty messages #31

New Issue

2026-07-28T05:07:13-07:00

westfarn commented

2026-07-28 05:07:13 -07:00

Problem

Prod showed rogue conversations with titles like Please Provide Your First Message. I'll Generate A, tied to long-lived LLM work.

Root cause: the frontend WebSocket keepalive sends { "type": "ping", "email": ... } with no message or conversation_id. Both chat consumers treated that as a new chat:

Call title generator on empty/null text
Create a conversation
Run the full LLM pipeline

An idle tab (e.g. mobile viewport left open) heartbeats every ~25s and can spawn these repeatedly.

Frontend already guards empty prompt text in the form, but the backend did not reject empty/whitespace payloads, and heartbeats were not ignored.

Expected

type: ping frames are ignored (no conversation, no title LLM, no chat pipeline)
Empty / whitespace-only user messages are rejected before any DB or LLM work
REST prompt create path also rejects empty text

Scope

Backend: consumers.py, consumers_graph.py, PromptSerializer, ConversationDetailView
Frontend defense-in-depth (trim + sendMessage guard) may land in chat_web_app separately if needed

Acceptance

Ping heartbeats create zero conversations
Empty/whitespace WS payloads return an error and create nothing
PromptSerializer rejects blank/whitespace messages
Tests cover heartbeat ignore + empty-message rejection

## Problem Prod showed rogue conversations with titles like `Please Provide Your First Message. I'll Generate A`, tied to long-lived LLM work. Root cause: the frontend WebSocket keepalive sends `{ "type": "ping", "email": ... }` with **no** `message` or `conversation_id`. Both chat consumers treated that as a new chat: 1. Call title generator on empty/null text 2. Create a conversation 3. Run the full LLM pipeline An idle tab (e.g. mobile viewport left open) heartbeats every ~25s and can spawn these repeatedly. Frontend already guards empty prompt text in the form, but the backend did not reject empty/whitespace payloads, and heartbeats were not ignored. ## Expected - `type: ping` frames are ignored (no conversation, no title LLM, no chat pipeline) - Empty / whitespace-only user messages are rejected before any DB or LLM work - REST prompt create path also rejects empty text ## Scope - Backend: `consumers.py`, `consumers_graph.py`, `PromptSerializer`, `ConversationDetailView` - Frontend defense-in-depth (trim + `sendMessage` guard) may land in `chat_web_app` separately if needed ## Acceptance - [ ] Ping heartbeats create zero conversations - [ ] Empty/whitespace WS payloads return an error and create nothing - [ ] `PromptSerializer` rejects blank/whitespace messages - [ ] Tests cover heartbeat ignore + empty-message rejection

westfarn referenced this issue from ai_ml_operations/chat_web_app

2026-07-28 05:07:25 -07:00

Guard empty/whitespace chat messages on the frontend #51

westfarn referenced this issue from a commit

2026-07-28 05:07:43 -07:00

Ignore WS heartbeats and reject empty chat messages.

westfarn referenced a pull request that will close this issue

2026-07-28 05:07:50 -07:00

Ignore WS heartbeats and reject empty chat messages #32

westfarn referenced this issue from ai_ml_operations/chat_web_app

2026-07-28 05:07:51 -07:00

Reject empty/whitespace chat messages before send #52