[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

I tried for a little while to figure out how they were doing it and realized they are just counting CSS markers. I also tried to find the right people in Google to talk to about this to no avail.

I think they would worry about blackhat SEOs manipulating this so they aren’t giving details.

bbPress clearly gives such meta info at the start of each topic, so unless someone radically changes their templates, it’s already in there.