Using this plugin, you never need to refresh the activity page to show new activities or load older activities. 

This plugin has two main functionalities:

1. It updates the river every 15 seconds to show new activities. For example, if you post to the wire on the wire page, the activity page will show your wire post automatically without page refresh. Think about it as facebook-like news-feed update.

2. It loads more activities when you reach the end of the activity page or hit the "load more" button. Reaching the end of the page has higher precedence than hitting the load more button. Think about it as facebook-like loading of older feeds.

I have defined two parameters on start.php that you can modify to suit your need:

define("LIMIT", 20); // limit on the number of activities to be loaded (for load more)

define("REFRESH_RATE", 15000); // refresh rate of the activity page in ms (for new-activities update)

The plugin is tested on elgg 1.8.19.

If the plugin works for you, please recommend it so I know how many elgg users got the plugin to work.