Comment 1 for bug 378374

I believe this was added due to some timeout problem of the chatservers when doing mass uid-checks. Which as a follow-up broke some stuff.

But yes, it should be changed.

Simply re-checking the UID in the whois table every 24h or something like that might mitigate the problem.

But I think the root of the problem actually is in the AOChat class, as I remember someone mentioning that the lookup cache for id/name pairs never times out either. So basically if a bot is running for a long time like weeks at once the cache never gets whiped. This results in always returning out-dated information.