openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Discord heartbeat DM targets degrade from user:<id> to channel:<id> [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

Discord heartbeat/session-derived DM routing can lose the user: prefix and degrade into channel:<id>, which causes outbound heartbeat delivery to fail with Unknown Channel.

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.4.25-beta.8
• Repo HEAD observed: ec71b01f71ad5156dd125fd019a9c59e29a3d53d
• Host OS: Windows
• Channel: Discord

Repro

1. Configure Discord DMs so the session's external route is a DM target like user:<discord-user-id>.
2. Use heartbeat delivery that resolves through session/external-target routing (for example target: "last", optionally with a direct-session heartbeat config).
3. Trigger a heartbeat run or let delivery recovery retry pending heartbeat deliveries.
4. Inspect the resulting outbound delivery target / queue entry / session metadata.

Expected

A DM target remains user:<id> all the way through outbound resolution, and the heartbeat can be delivered to the Discord DM.

Actual

The target can be degraded to a bare numeric ID and then normalized as channel:<id>, which causes heartbeat delivery to fail with Unknown Channel.

Observed symptoms included:

• direct sends to user:<id> work
• heartbeat-related deliveries were enqueued as channel:<id>
• retry queue entries reported lastError: "Unknown Channel"

Suspected root cause

In extensions/discord/src/channel.ts, parseDiscordExplicitTarget() returns target.id instead of target.normalized:

return {
  to: target.id,
  chatType: target.kind === "user" ? ("direct" as const) : ("channel" as const),
};

That drops the explicit target kind for DMs. Later outbound normalization treats the bare numeric ID as a channel target, which turns user:<id> into channel:<id>.

Local validation

Changing that one field to target.normalized fixed the built plugin behavior locally:

return {
  to: target.normalized,
  chatType: target.kind === "user" ? ("direct" as const) : ("channel" as const),
};

I also added and ran a regression test in extensions/discord/src/channel.test.ts to verify that:

• parsing user:123456789012345678 returns { to: "user:123456789012345678", chatType: "direct" }

The narrow source test passed locally after the fix:

node scripts/run-vitest.mjs run extensions/discord/src/channel.test.ts

Suggested fix

Preserve the canonical normalized target in parseDiscordExplicitTarget() by returning target.normalized instead of target.id.