Live Topic/AJAX Thread Updates

[James]

For anyone familiar with vBulletin, a nice add-on was released over there that automatically updated a thread that received replies within X minutes. It was useful for allowing a constant flow of conversation in topics that were considered live.

Anyone who could code this, it would be great.

Note: Kier has been looking into this, so before taking on the responsibility of coding this, please take into account that this could become core functionality.

The only way to implement this properly is to do it with long polling, or a similar pseudo-push technology. It's already something I'm investigating, but people need to be aware that a sure way to get kicked off a shared host is to try long polling with an Apache or IIS server - long polling needs a very specific server running alongside your main webserver (on the same computer is fine) that is optimised for large numbers of relatively dormant open requests - something that Apache is not at all.