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.
of course it will make the response larger... but whats the difference if you refresh the page?
bandwidth wise on a active forum this should save you bandwidth.
CPU wise (there may be a hit, depending on your settings)
I still need to run benchmarking tests with various scenarios.
There are already about 10 big boards using this product, i haven't heard any bandwidth complaints. They did however have to tweak the default time settings, to find an equilibrium.
what were your server restrictions? actual data bandwidth, cpu usage, database cpu usage, or database connection limits?
Question~Any way to get this implemented on the forum? Like, threads that automatically bump up after posting, like posts?
it would be possible but it may be more intensive.
(at least with live topic every topic isn't live, but with a forum no matter what it would be making calls? Unless you can figure out a good way of determining whats going on. I guess you can change the user Idle time to be really small.)
Reason why i picked threads was because the normal user experience is a pain in the ass, when the other person is there and your both engaged in a conversation.
also id like to share that actual user posting on one of the forums i manage went from 50 posts a day average 300. And another one went from 100 to 400. (this is 1 week avg per day)