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 just installed this but only one user says that it's working properly for them. Certain topics appear as "live" on the thread index pages, but when viewing a thread new replies do not appear at the bottom. We've tried almost every browser, version, and OS. The one user who does have it working is using firefox 2.0.0.20 on windows ME. How can I find the source of the problem? I'm not getting any javascript errors with firebug... Someone please help!
Edit: A number of people are reporting that they're getting a popup that alerts them of new posts.
anyone have any idea why this mod would conflict with "who's online" - when enable it shows everyone at my forumhome- when disable who's online again shows the exact location of my users?>
Nice concept, but... doesn't seem to work with 3.8.1 and Forum Ad Managment and VB Ad Managment which is the only other plug I have It seems to work once in a while. But hey, you can't be compatible with everything
Well there were no errors. I saw it work a couple of times, but our server aren't that busy, our site is only a week old. We have maybe 30 ppl on at once. It seems not to work with the limited testing we'vd done, but may have the numbers too high/low and maybe it conflicts with the two plugins we have.
So I don't want to say it "doesn't work" as our site isn't be best test
My board went up and down spiking now and then (up to 20) with this installed.. I have a dedicated Dual Xeon E5405 Quad Core (Harpertown) with 6 GB of ram. After disabling this mod, the load went back to 2. I have an average of 300-400 members online at once. It's a really nice mod though. I guess I'll start adjusting the time intervals and see if that makes any difference at all.