[Adam Harley (Kawauso)]

$limit was passed something which wasn’t numeric because… I guess that’s what do_action() does when it doesn’t have any arguments? Doing a var_dump(), it appears to be an empty string, so I guess it just passed the default value of the argument variable.

I found it because I noticed the SQL query wasn’t valid when it was run in phpMyAdmin and then noticed that there wasn’t anything after LIMIT.

I don’t know if there’s any performance gain, but it’s how bbPress code is written iirc and in the case of calling the user table, it’s essential when you’re working with a WP/bbP integration (as the table prefix is different).

So mostly it allows for the table names to be entirely variable, which is probably better practice in case a plugin changes them.