Chat history survives a cold start

Sending a message in a conversation that already had earlier turns could fail outright if the portal had only just restarted. The round ended in an error rather than an answer, and trying again a moment later often worked — which made it look like an intermittent glitch rather than something reproducible.

It was not a glitch. When a conversation is read for the first time after a restart, its earlier messages briefly arrive in a raw, not-yet-typed form. The step that rebuilds the conversation for the assistant only recognised the fully-typed form, so it quietly treated every earlier message as unreadable, waited out its own time limit on each one, and then — correctly refusing to answer with no history at all — failed the round.

Earlier messages are now read in whichever form they arrive, so the assistant sees the whole conversation and the round proceeds normally. A message that is genuinely unreadable is still skipped and still recorded as such, and a conversation with no earlier turns still starts cleanly rather than erroring.