CB Activity 3.0 RC1 Released

Really important would be real time auto updating of activity stream.
To prevent server overload there should be an admin setting for time interval and completely turn off real time updates.

It's planned for a later release, but most hosting environments won't be able to handle it. For example Recent Activity with commenting and 30 entries per page is 31 streams that would be updating. A redesign of how the queries function would also be needed so only the latest new entries could be pulled then on the ajax parsing duplicate entries need to be parsed out so it's not auto adding the same entries.

forge.joomlapolis.com/issues/5281

Auto updating of comments is a good thing, however it can be troublesome with status posts and such. On Facebook for example I've had plenty of times where I'm reading over a thoughtful status post and then suddenly it's bumped down by a new post without refreshing the page. :huh: So keep this in mind as a factor.

But I do believe in an admins right to choose how to handle this.

Auto updating will be disabled by default. There will be a parameter to control how often it auto updates. It will also have a cutoff (probably another param) so it doesn't auto update forever (you don't want people walking away from their computer and it infinitely pinging you).

There's nothing I can do about the page shift. That's just the nature of the feature and it will shift the page, but you can optionally leave it off if you want.

Actually I think this is quite an interesting point. Why making it not even better than facebook.
I believe a Javascript event could be found to halt auto updating temporarily. It could be a mousedown or a focus event. This could mean that if a user presses the mouse button permanently or gives focus to an object, auto updating could pause for a bit.

I think that would be a great thing.

No, listening to mouse events on every DOM object is a nightmare for performance. That's a bubble up event and would fire thousands of times, because you can't prevent default on that behavior without breaking links.

It'll be a very simple setTimeout at the interval supplied and once it hits the maximum intervals it stops auto updating. Typically you'd auto update every 5 minutes and stop after 30 minutes (who stares at their stream for 30+ minutes straight? 0.1% of users I wager). Both the interval and maximum intervals will be parameters though so they can be change for your needs (disabled by default).

I don´t know CB Activity so I cannot really give advice. But there might be a way do limit this function to a specific object or focus.
I can remember similar issue with chat windows in Flash. Messages kept coming in and scrolling down faster than you can read them.
So sometimes there was a scrolling stop implemented on mouse over. As long as the mouse was placed over the text area it stopped scrolling.

So maybe it is possible to define a special area where to place the mouse or to tick a box or what ever to let a user have a bit of control over the updating process. I think this would be really useful and user friendly.