Yes, there is auto-refresh, on a per-page basis. When you've got a page open, right-click and select "Reload every"... with the latest versions, if you select a time interval, it automatically selects "Enable" for you (it didn't used to do that). If you save your session and restart opera with the same pages, it will of course remember this setting. Beautiful, eh?

I use that feature on my BBC news page I always have open, and sometimes if I open a webcam page, but not much else.

But anyway, that shouldn't affect your tribe.net logout problems. Tribe isn't "booting you"... your sitting with a tribe page open doesn't consume any of their bandwidth (until you click something). Auto-reloading the page WILL use their bandwidth though, and if it happens after you've just posted a message, you'll re-post that message every 5 minutes or whatever!

There is something wrong. It happens to a lot of people but very inconsistently. It was reported on TribeIdeas or some tribe like that, I replied that I'd never seen it, then I started seeing it on a different computer. Anyway, the answer to your question is "yes", but I don't think it'll help you avoid the "boot".

I haven't experienced it in a while. Good luck with that. It has something to do with cookies (that's how they know you're logged in), so check your cookie settings. Try enabling all cookies with no restrictions, and see if the problem continues.