[_ck_]

Actually originally in my code, I was unserializing the data ONCE, then the array is passed globally, already in place. Serializing data is only bad if you are going to be constantly unserializing it in the same bbpress instance. I don’t do that (on purpose).

(update, actually I have to go back and fix the process with that, I did a quick fix around a bug and fetched $topic each time but that needs to be a global also – all the code used to be in one routine so $topic was only fetched once, but that’s changed – I can fix)

I used meta data because that’s what it’s there for. There is no need on a forum to create extra tables for stuff that won’t be used outside bbpress. I look at all the downsides of poll plugins like WP-Polls and tried to avoid them.

The goal was to use bbpress routines wherever possible for future tweaks. As I go back and cleanup bits of code I can already see where and how to make it more ajax-like (though that’s not a priority).