Automatically Refresh Forums

Question

What do you guys think about automatically refresh forum posts on the forums home page say every 2 mins? Is there any other (better) way to show latest forum posts without refreshing the page?

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Thank you. The ability to know what threads have been seen or not seen would be easy to do somehow. Since the Recently Updated list is sorted by the time the thread was created or last updated it is essentially a matter of storing the last time that a member has viewed the list and use that somehow. At a minimum the time could be shown for reference purposes. So if something was done for the page then that would help. Keeping track of each thread individually would be nice but a simpler solution could provide the most benefit for the amount of work required. The ability to refresh the forum index was an issue when there was competition for prizes but since that is no longer an issue it is less important that we get immediate updates of threads we have not seen. I got behind a few days so I went back a few days to find the oldest threads I have not seen. I saw a few questions about a week old that had no response that I thought deserved a response.

Mahesh Chand · Answer

Good suggestions Sam. I think we can implement a feature where an icon will show you if a thread has updated since you last visited the forums. Will that solve the issue? It might take us sometime to implement that but we can definitely do that. I will hold off on forum refresh issue unless we get more feedback.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

I am concerned that there might be unforseen side-affects. I think there are other improvements that would help more. I have difficulty keeping track of which threads I have already seen. It would help if there was something that would help with that. I am concerned that if the thread index was automatically refreshed then the threads would become a moving target and it would be more difficult to keep track of what I have seen and what I have not seen. For that reason I would prefer to retain control of when the forum index gets updated. If you do implement the automatic refresh then I hope it is a feature I can choose not to use. The option to receive notificatioons when a thread is uppdated was very important. Thank you for providing that. It is the type of automatic notification that really helps. Another possible improvement is to show a thread or a portion of a thread when the mouse hovers over the thread in the thread index. Other forums do that. It is a productive way to quickly determine if a thread is one we want to look at.