The auto-refresh of the game page is in fact rather nice. I can tell it was implemented to help keep you up-to-date on things in case you didn't remember to refresh yourself. I enjoy that, and it's fairly useful to me in that sense.

There's quite a few problems that arise from this, though. Most notably, when you're trying to do a score attack/time attack, the page sometimes refreshes in the background (Because you need the game page to be able to start a score attack/time attack) and when it does, my controls lock up and it becomes intensely frustrating to play. Especially in a game that requires fast fingers, like Tetris. Even happening while in Net Play, my friend Sonikku reported of the lag to me while playing in a Net Play session with me. To add to this, the auto-refresh sometimes has the odd habit of going and refreshing without my consent while I'm trying to read something. It's happened to me twice for a review one time.

This feature is pretty nice, but I sometimes wish there was a way for it to stop refreshing when I wanted it to, so I can play my games lag-free, and update details when I want to, but turn it on when I'm not viewing things or playing games, and/or want to keep up-to-date while doing something else.

I wonder, what do others think about the auto-refresh feature for the website? Does it need a little tuning? Does it need to stay just like it is?
What are your comments on this, if you please?

I honestly think that something should be done about this. As much as I like it, the negative aspects often outweigh the positive for me.

What was this feature intended to be for, anyway? I wonder why, since every other website I know doesn't go and randomly refresh the entire page randomly.

Davideo7 : This only pertains to you, so I'm summoning you.

Uh... thread creator... are you talking about just game pages, or are you talking about the site in general? I have some issues with lags when I try to update a few pages.

thing1 : It is just game pages...

tRIUNE : Oh. O.K. I was just checking. I have no problems with the RGR pages. Just the member list, TdV, and VCS threads when I am competing, or shooting for passing somebody in a ranking. And it is only sometimes. Just felt like that needed to be re-iterated.

This sort of thread was meant for the issues that are caused from the page auto-reloading. This includes game pages as well as any other page that automatically reloads itself. In general, the game page reloading is probably the most hurtful of all, since a disability to control in some cases can be very substantial. Not so much for non-active games like board game ports, the Rockboard game, or various others, but for active games like Tetris, R-Type, or Zero Wing, it can be a dramatic problem.

Oh, and if the website goes down, you can't keep the page, because the page will eventually auto-refresh and then you can't view the information on the page anymore. Same happened to me as well a few days ago.

If you mean problems with the pages auto-refreshing, as in they take forever to automatically refresh, that could be because of your Internet. In said case, disabling the auto-refresh would be good, for those that still stand on old or slow network connections (Or, dial-up even. Some people still have to live with dial-up.)

If you have issues with lag from the website in general and trying to download pages but they download slowly, there's not much I can do about that then hope you get a faster connection.

Edit: My post is late, very late. Sonic would be ashamed.

The feature was intentional and was added at around the time I created the Retro Game Room. There's a few reasons why I made it do that:
1. Since it refreshes every 15 minutes, it updates your online status to show that you're online. The site only show users who have had activity in the past 15 minutes so if you were to play a game and the game page didn't refresh, it wouldn't show that you're using the site, even if you have a game open and are playing.
2. To help site revenue. By having the page refresh, the ads are also refreshing and that helps generate revenue. The site costs well over $2000 a month to keep up due to server fees so any way I can help increase site revenue helps vizzed.
3. It keeps the data of the game's page up to date.

For me personally, the page refreshing doesn't affect my game at all. Since it affects you, that makes me wonder what percentage of users are affected by the game page refreshing.

I'll try to come up with a solution but for the time being, I just made a poll here asking the public:
https://www.vizzed.com/boards/thread.php?id=58149