I apprecaite your efforts greatly Chris, but this might be the straw that pushed the camel back to other forum software until after 1.1.

Thats it yes, your example works nicely.
The thing is, i could always write a plugin todo a recurring loop through all parent/child nodes and count forums posts and update the latest one for each parent - but really this should be something in the core.

Effectively its a bug, and one i raised a year ago :(

see this http://www.lawserver.com/forums/

Do the totals work the way you want for forums/parents/subforums? That is bbPress installation I integrated with Joomla of all things. I believe I fixed the problem with a plugin or some custom code so if this is the end result you're looking for, let me know and I will look back at how I did it.

No posts:
http://fellowshipoftheding.org/forums/
(look at class mechanics on the bottom)

And yet it actually does:
http://www.fellowshipoftheding.org/forums/forum/class-mechanics

In the discussion that ensured, it transpired that BBpress doesn't incorporate linaegae or heritage in anyway.

EDIT: OOps link may be wrong:

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-mindset-features-and-where-now-discuss

and specifically http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-mindset-features-and-where-now-discuss#post-20777 really help to see the fundamental of BBpress not understanding lineage/heritage in the core.

That is exactly what i was trying to accomplish. That way I can host forums for different sites on one central install. Is it possible?

Its even simpler.

Forum
- Sub Forum

no matter how often or how new a topic/post is in "Sub Forum" (or any sub forum), BBpress always considers that the latest post in Forum to be exactly that, the latest topic in Forum.

e.g.

UK - (topic: how to use this forum 5 months ago)
- Scotland (topic: Rules of the Scotland section - 4 months ago)
- - Edinburgh (topic: New post - 1 day ago)

Whenever querying UK as a Forum, and especially on the homepage where it lists forums, it never ever shows that the latest topic to be from its sub forums. Now if you're like me and have a few parent/child relationships in your forums and keep a sticky closed at the upper most parent, tht means on the home page it will always show that sticky closed and not updated since (X months ago).

If i can give a geeky example from today: http://fellowshipoftheding.org/forums/

According to the homepage the bototm forum "Wrath of the Lich King"'s latest discussion was 3 months ago, but if you actually click into it, and then into any of the sub forums, you can see thats not true.

It makes forums appear to be dated and or dead, and people are moe likely to just post a topic anywhere and then make a Moderator move it.

Thanks for your help,

Kev

P.S. I realise that BBpress has a "latest discussions" table, and that great if thats the point of your forum, but not all forums are like that.

P.P.S. My gut tells me, as it told me when i first reported this issue about a year ago in alpha2, that it appeared to me to a core issue. Parent/Child relationships aren't exactly that, instead the whole thing feels like a port of _CK_'s old plugin into the core (of which this was a known issue).

http://www.lawserver.com/forums/forum/elderly

On that page, there are three subforums (and not much traffic.) On this page, you would want to see latest discussions for each subforum, or latest discussions from any subforum, listed here? Trying to understand the scope of the problem. Thanks

Any advice on this is apprecaited.

I think it'd be possible, but I could use some guidance.

Thanks!