Is there a easy way to auto-refresh the hrmsaces website.
I have observed that if I raise a query and keep the site open for sometime the page does not automatically refresh if I get a reply to my query.

Hmmm
The short answer is no.

The auto refresh requires a http-meta refresh tag to be present on the page. However this then causes quite large amounts of overhead in processing and bandwidth both on the server and on the client (as its the browser which responds to the refresh tag to go back and request the page again). This would be detrimental to the overall performance of the site as a whole.

The only page this is actually implemented on is the "Who's Online" page.

The "content islands" (the left and right hand items on each page) are static items that are rebuilt periodically by the server (with varying refresh intervals).

If you want to know if anyone has responded to a post of yours there is the option to add it to your watched topics and use your preferences to notify you when anything in your watched list is updated.

Regards

Thanks, I did notice that when I click on the "Who's Online" link the page refreshes itself.

But perhaps this makes others feel that I am like stalker checking on who's online .. doing what.... (provided they realise that this is the easiest way to refresh..
Will it be wise to copy the exact same Who's Online link and call it as "Page Refresh" ?? and point it to Homepage?

You might want to consider an alternative browser: Opera

On there, if you right-click on a page, you get the option to refresh page every so many seconds or minutes or not at all.

The Opera browser also offers multi-tabbing - in fact it had that capability before IE thought of it.

I do use the F5 button on IE but that doesn't seem to refresh the "Recent Posts" and other tabs on the left hand side

OK this is a test - I am posting this in a Firefox session, and watching the thread on an Opera session with a 30-second refresh...

...Yes, that works. The only issue now is, when the page is refreshed it repositions the screen to the top of the post, so even then it's not immediately obvious that a new post has come in if the page is bigger than the screen.

I suppose the other thing you could do is monitor the forum itself, where you should get an indication of new posts against the thread (usually a number in red)

The recent posts region is a static component built by a backgroup php process on the server (as are the Top Posters, Forum Stats, Birthdays, Newest Members and the Recent Vacancies regions).
All of these are pre-determined refresh periods, ranging from Daily (for the birthdays one) to every 10 minutes.

I could decrease the refresh time on the recent posts to (say) 1 minute but i think the current site traffic does not warrant it. Everytime one of these page regions is rebuilt it requires a background process to run - if one of these was running too frequently it would eat up valuable processing resource and slow everything else down.

That said - i am hoping things will improve when i move it all over to the new hosts, but this is unlikely to happen until easter as i need a couple of days to do it.