Live post feed?

Post by **Gayno** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 11:31 am

Another forum I was on a few years back had a "live feed" option.

So for loners like me who sit at the PC all night, I didn't have to click "New posts" every 5 minutes to see if someone had posted

@indigolemon @kawa

Post by **NafemanNathan** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 12:59 pm

Good idea, but if this is possible, make sure it's something you can easily toggle on and off

A1ex · Post by **A1ex** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 1:09 pm

I've setup something similar on one of the systems I'd setup in work. You just need a refresh script in the new post page header, set it to refresh every 60-90 seconds and jobs a good un. Good idea.

p.s.

This is the script that I used in the head element of the page;

<META http-equiv="Refresh" content="60;url=http://www.ludegeneration.co.uk/search. ... d=newposts">

and heypresto if you wanted to do it that was of course

Post by **Gayno** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 1:23 pm

I can see how that would work, but surely refreshing the page would increase the traffic on the server.

The forum I've seen it on, the page updated automatically as soon as someone posted. Much like the live feed in the top right corner of Facebook.

A1ex · Post by **A1ex** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 1:40 pm

The live feed with new post with increase load on the server too.

It will have to keep the connection open with the server rather than reloading and will still have to keep checking for changes to all of the tables in the database. Think you'd need to use AJAX or similar for this function to work.

Either way it will increase server traffic, the first method is a bit more striaght forward which is why I use it

Post by **Ammo** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 1:46 pm

Just click "New posts" you lazy sod lol

Post by **indigolemon** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 9:56 am

Err ... nah! Not going to invest any time in that one, sorry @Gayno. To be honest, it's a feature that may eventually end up finding it's way into phpBB anyway - until then though not planning on doing that.

@A1ex - dude! That's a nasty hack right there man

Been a while since I played with the old meta refresh tags. I vaguely remember trying to time an animated gif so that the page would click on after it finished loading way back in the late 90's. Remember thinking I'd cracked it, then the first person still on a 14k modem tried the site

A1ex · Post by **A1ex** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 10:11 am

I know, it works tho. On all browsers and reliably too so it's good for me

Post by **Donald** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 10:39 am

What the hell is a 14k modem? I didn't think anything was worse than 56k.

A1ex · Post by **A1ex** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 10:47 am

I had a 28.8k for a while

I remember taking 45 minutes to download a 3 minute song on napster. IF the connection dropped out on 95% you had to start again