Fixed a problem! :) The page had to be manually refreshed until I figured out that this plugin utilizes the Prototype library and my vBulletin template happened to utilize the jQuery library too. These javascript libraries collided, which caused the updates to stop displaying live. I know this is the case because I was getting a javascript error saying the following:

"element.dispatchEvent is not a function"

Further research revealed that this error occurs because Prototype is being called but jQuery is interfering. Maybe because both libraries utilize the $ character.

In my case jQuery was being called from the footer, so I created a custom vBulletin template called footerNoJQuery from which jQuery was removed. In the PHP file, I swapped out the existing PHP call to $footer, replacing it with $footerNoJQuery, and this fixed the problem since jQuery was no longer on the page.