This product is different from anything you have seen before, it raises the bar for forums. It will make your forums much more interactive, and also reduce server load.
Technical Details:
If a thread has been posted in X seconds then its now Live, if other users are viewing the Live topic and are on the last page they will experience a clean ajax experience while talking to other members. Once the thread is older than X seconds its no longer Live and it will now act like a normal thread. Also if a user edits one of their posts that's inside of the thread, it will be updated too so there is no longer a reason to ever have to refresh.
There is also logic for the viewer, the viewer of the thread has to be in an active state to see responses. An active user state is determined upon the users actions, if no actions were made in X seconds then the user is marked as inactive.
Also you may wonder why this could save your server bandwidth and CPU. If a user is refreshing to talk to another members the queries on a normal thread load are way more intense than the ajax call that this modification makes. So if you have 5 people talking to each other none of them have to refresh the page, all they are doing is simple page requests and one intense request when there has actual change.
You can test Live Topic with two users, you will see how amaizing this is... And probably spontaneously combust.
Definitely the most popular plugin I've ever installed, within minutes people were really loving the way it all worked. I saw some worrying spikes in my server load though, so just as a precaution I have disabled it for now. Please keep working on it though, if you can make this work on a big forum, I'd pay to be able to install it, it has the potential to be really something special.
and decent dedicated server could run this mod with very few issues (with the default settings). If your hosting package cant handle the load then please go into your ACP and go under the LiveTopic section and play with the settings.
I do not recommend this mod for sites that get high traffic and run on shared hosting, as they limit the simultaneous connections. If you have a shared forum that has a small user base then it should be fine. And if you have hosting that doesn't limit connections you should be fine.
Wow - with a forum that's currently just growing (just a little over 500 members) and at the time the host had its fit about the spiking usage, there were only 30ish members online. I'd absolutely hate to see what size (must be tiny) forum this can run on without the issues of usage spiking. And, just to note...I had already accessed the ACP and played with the settings - extending the time for queries - obviously that didn't do much.
I do agree that this is a great concept, think it needs some tweaking.
maybe a silly question, but does it work in IE6 also ?
I know IE6 isn't in the list, but just wanted to check if it's either IE6 or my browser settings that prevent it from working for me.
It's working fine in firefox ... this is a great mod!
I run a forum which averages about 250 currently active users online. I saw no difference in our server loads when I installed this. I really think it depends on the site and the servers (I have both a web server and a database server for the site).
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DB Changes 
Is in Beta Stage 
02-07-2009, 07:22 AM
