There is a race condition with the group method.

[segmentio]

There is a race condition with the group method.

[travisjeffery]

Thanks for the issue. We're looking into this.

@calvinfo @ianstormtaylor

[ianstormtaylor]

I've reached out to Intercom again about this, since I never heard back. The issue I believe is that their API doesn't support the idea of a timestamped update, so even if there were two identify calls fired at the same time, we can't guarantee which will hit their servers first I believe. We'll see what they recommend as a workaround for this.

[hadees]

I've had a similar issue with alias on Mixpanel which I eventually had to solve by just using their api. I understand the issues involved but I think this will keep cropping up with other interrogations unless somewhere on your server side you handle the sending order.

[ianstormtaylor]

What was the alias problem and solution? If you don't mind me asking.

I got this response from Intercom:

We've recently released the new version of our REST APIs, this new API is completely rebuilt from the ground up. At the moment we've not got the bandwidth to add a separate timestamp mechanism in order to keep message processing of concurrent calls in order when they hit our API. The platform team is now aware of this though and will be thinking of ways that we might be able to handle this better in the future.

Gonna ask a followup to narrow down the issue for them and see if we can get it fixed.

[hadees]

alias was getting called after identify some times which resulted in two users in Mixpanel that weren't linked together. In Mixpanel's own ruby library alias is blocking so I ended up just using Mixpanel's library to alias since that was the only place at the time we were tracking anonymous users.