Presence Membership Semantics — What Realtime Signals Cannot Tell Dispatch Polls
Treat realtime presence membership as a recent observation, never as proof that a participant saw, processed, or answered a live poll. Explained in operational terms, presence can tell you which identities have represented connections; it cannot tell you who received the question. For a logistics session, keep poll delivery and vote acceptance in a durable event path, attach explicit identifiers,…
Realtime presence membership should be treated as a recent observation, not proof that a participant saw, processed, or responded to a live poll. Presence identifies which identities are connected but cannot determine who received the question or if a vote was accepted. To improve the user interface, keep poll delivery and vote acceptance in a durable event path with explicit identifiers.
Presence only enhances the interface, not the poll's validity. Dispatcher d-17, warehouse lead w-04, and driver r-208 illustrate how connection-level rosters can contain multiple devices for one person. Presence shows system-observed membership, not human attention. To build a poll, persist a poll with a stable ID and monotonically increasing revision, publish lightweight notifications to the session, accept idempotent votes, and record acknowledgements separately.
Presence supplies a current audience estimate for the operator screen but does not decide if a vote is valid or become the system of record.
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