How to ignore old messages sent when the bot was offline

[Abo5]

Hi,
Let's say I have a very simple bot

require 'telegram/bot'

Telegram::Bot::Client.run(ENV['TOKEN']) do |bot|
  bot.listen do |message|
    case message.text
    when '/start'
      bot.api.send_message(chat_id: message.chat.id, text: 'Hello!')
    when '/stop'
      bot.api.send_message(chat_id: message.chat.id, text: 'Goodbye!')
    when 'Hi'
      bot.api.send_message(chat_id: message.chat.id, text: 'Hello')
    end
  end
end

And someone spammed Hi in the group chat while the bot was offline, how can I make the bot ignore all the messages that was sent when it was offline? Knowing that there's no database to store when it came back alive.

[AlexWayfer]

I guess, it's not a question to the library. It's up to your application (bot), business logic.

Commonly, you can process these messages and response as regular (but with delay).

But… to ignore them — you have to keep some marker in application, like a start time, and compare incoming messages time with it, for example.

As I know, Telegram will forget about these pending messages after some time, maybe around 1 hour, or 24 hours.