Bug causing profile picture to change when moving comments to chat

Question

I have a profile picture set on site A and a different profile picture on site B. Site A is my default parent site, so it's the one that should show in all chat windows. However the image changes to that of site B when I click "automatically move comments to chat" on an answer's comment thread. All open chat windows reload themselves and my profile image changes on all of them.

The interesting thing is that my parent site still shows as site A when I look at my user settings, but what is displayed is that of site B. I have to switch my default parent site away and back to fix this.

For me, site A is Information Security and site B is Cryptography.

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Edit: This happened again, this time when someone else clicked the button, without me even having to join the chat. This is getting very irritating. Is there any update on the possibility for a fix?

Answer 1

Encountered this bug yesterday. It not only changes the profile picture but also the display name, in case you use different user names on site A and site B, and create a chat room from a comment thread in site B (using the "automatically move comments to chat"). In fact, even the room's name ("Discussion between X and Y") is copied over from site B rather than the chat parent (site A).

I initially wondered whether it was an intentional change, as users on site B might be knowing me only by my site B name, so it doesn't make sense to create a room using my site A name. But no, this one is rather annoying, mainly because it immediately changes the chat display name globally and not just in the "Discussion between X and Y" room. Also, it turns out that when the chat profile is refreshed the name and profile picture are again reset from the chat parent. So the change is only temporary, although the room's name is permanent unless you change it manually.

Anyway, either SE needs to make this a permanent per-room feature (i.e. the site B name should be visible only when chatting in rooms generated from comment threads on site B) or not bother doing this at all. Applying the change globally doesn't make sense.