Corrects the timestamp guard shipped in 5b07ee2, which assumed the
reporter's "722 days ago" contacts were genuine mid-2024 observations.
They were not.
MeshCore seeds an unset clock with a hardcoded time rather than zero:
1715770351 (15 May 2024) in VolatileRTCClock, and RTC_TIME_MIN
1772323200 (1 Mar 2026) on the NRF52 and ESP32 RTC paths. Measured from
the date in the issue, 1715770351 is exactly 722 days — every affected
contact reported the same figure because they were all sitting on the
same seed.
So those contacts were never stale. Their clocks were unset, and the bot
was reading that as extreme age: they sorted to the top of the staleness
list, consumed the whole per-sweep removal budget, and the bot kept
trying to evict nodes that may well have been active. The previous
2020-then-2024-01-01 floor sat below both seeds and never fired.
Now matched against the seeds themselves, plus anything at or below the
earliest (which still covers a raw 0 decoding to 1970). A device running
unsynced for a while reports seed + uptime and remains undetectable;
noted in the docstring rather than guessed at.
agessaman
c1cbdf9878