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.
I think the idea is fantastic but it will have problems working with large very active forums. I was thinking maybe if static files could be used to create and update the threads instead of pulling it from the database it may perform better.
I mean when posts are posted in LiveTopic store them as compressed html files in a folder and then have the ajax script check for new posts in the thread and pull those files and display them. This could also get rid of those nasty incompatibilities. Since the post will be stored with everything processed it would just be a matter of pulling and displaying the html.
I am thinking about having this developed properly - please contact me if you could work out something like this. I would bear the development cost and of course it would be free for all.
Code:
Server Load Averages 123.89 44.03 89.06 | 1,694 Users Online (651 members and 1043 guests)
Absolutely yes, I have 1 big forum that online at peak around 1900 and usually around 1600 at once time and my server got leaking and lagging till dead (Must restart httpd) after I activated this mod, and I recommended to technician forum who have user above 1000 to not use this mod except u have multi server cluster and best performance servers.
Seems this mod is not actively monitored by the developer - I have posted a project on elance to get a developer to develop this with static files option. Haven't found a developer yet.
Just installed will watch with interest - loved your video cool. I run vbadvanced now having this on the recent threads block would be out of this world.