I disagree! I find 'auto refresh' very handy at times, and would hate to see it taken off the site. Admittedly, there are those who will abuse or take it to excess, but this does not validate the negation of it for everybody.

there was only 22 people online when i couldnt log in (for over 2 hours again) so i doubt taking away auto refresh will make the slightist bit of difference (i disabled my auto refresh months ago)

I don't mean to be a pain, but in what way is the auto refresh useful? I can't think of any uses for it.

When I was new to the site, I found it very usefull when I was surfing the site, reading boards etc. After about a month I turned it off to help the server, I really liked it as a new member.

I think its wise if people knew they could turn it off (Under Settings - general) that they do that. I wonder if we all turned it off for a week if there would be a difference in performance? Can't hurt to try it.. I turned mine off just now

to be honest if fencer thought it would help the site i would have thought he would have temporaroly disabled that feature , maybe fencer could give us his opinion

I try to look at both sides of it, but must say i dont really see any need for it at all.
Is there any real difference between that & hitting the F5 key on a PC (None).
Going back to earlier when myself & tonyh were talking about it, if 120 people are on line & only 40 are playing games, BUT the other 80 have there refresh set at 10 seconds - surely this is just putting the server under pressure that isnt needed, as little as it may be.
I think that if a person does not make a move or do something on the site after a certain time either there auto-refresh could be disabled OR maybe they should just be logged off & have t log back on again.
Just a few thoughts :-)

vikings, if you are surfing the site and clikcing on different pages, the auto refresh serves no purpose. I am not sure you understand what it does. The auto refresh refreshes the page when you are idle, doing nothing at all. So it does not apply to the situation you described.

I also think that autorefresh is pretty much useless and should be disabled atleast until the server issues are solved. I've turned mine off ages ago. I usually keep brainking in one browser window even if i'm browsing other sites or doing something else on the computer. I'm sure i'm not the only one who does this. If i had auto refresh on i'd be generating lots of unneeded requests to the server. I bet many don't even know about the auto refresh and are stressing the server needlessly.