Last modified: 2014-02-19 22:06:13 UTC
I think Flow should query the server every few seconds or minutes and show new messages on a page I opened, without me having to reload it.
The ability to show real-time updates to Flow conversations is definitely on our roadmap, but the functionality to do this will need to be added to mediawiki core, as it doesn't currently exist in any WMF software.
There are two different ways this could be achieved. The first, which is possible right now, would just be to query the server after a certain interval, maybe 60 seconds. This wastes resources and isn't nice to the server either. The second is to use real time updates, probably sent using websockets. [[mw:Requests_for_comment/Publishing_the_RecentChanges_feed#websockets]] has some relevant info about that. It was informally discussed at the Architecture Summit, but I haven't had time to follow up on it.