It would be nice to see chat scrolling live without having to refresh the main site, but it's not rocket science to enter and chip-in if you want, but I like to know who's actually in chat.
Not sure how that could be got around - if you stopped the auto-logout when inactive at least you could see who was theoretically around or lurking.
IMHO, the problem is folk who never log out.
Perhaps I should be brave enough to politely ask them to bugger off, err I mean to log out properly?