README

A lightweight real-time polling extension for Flarum 2.0 that provides instant updates for new discussions and notifications without requiring WebSockets, SSH access, or Node.js.

🚀 Features

• ✅ No WebSocket required - Works with standard HTTP requests
• ✅ No SSH or Node.js - Perfect for shared hosting
• ✅ Self-hosted - Complete control, no external dependencies
• ✅ Lightweight - Minimal server resources consumption
• ✅ Real-time updates - Check for new discussions and notifications every 10 seconds (configurable)
• ✅ Visual notifications - Banner for new discussions and badge for notification count
• ✅ Zero configuration - Install and it just works
• 🌍 Multilingual support - English and Italian included (easy to add more languages)

📋 How It Works

Instead of maintaining a persistent WebSocket connection, FLA Polling uses HTTP polling:

1. Every 10 seconds, the browser sends a lightweight AJAX request to the server
2. The server checks the database for the latest discussion ID and unread notification count
3. If there are changes, the UI updates automatically:
   • A banner appears when new discussions are posted
   • The notification badge updates with the new count

This approach is extremely efficient and works on any standard LAMP/LEMP stack.

Performance Impact

For a forum with 100 concurrent users and 10-second polling interval:

• 10 HTTP requests per second to your server
• Each request executes 2 simple database queries (less than 1ms each)
• Total overhead: negligible (equivalent to a few page loads per minute)

📦 Installation

Via Composer (Recommended)

composer require peopleinside/fla-polling