It is AJAX thread polling and it does expire after 300 seconds if you do not move your mouse on thread pages. Basically, as Mitchell said, it will update the thread on the page, as it is being written. So, if Mitchell and I were both concurrently writing to a thread, and he submitted his post first, it would appear on my screen without refreshing the page. This is called live AJAX thread polling and it is used on this site. Once again, after 300 seconds it times out if you do not use your mouse. There is no spyware or unusual software running on these servers whatsoever. Any insinuation that such exists is nonsensical. Thank you.