Minor bug - last post != last post when post is deleted

There is a minor bug in the forums that is a little bit annoying. If a post is removed it is still shown as the last post on the "summary" page. That is if you load the main page you'll see that for the Python forums the current information looks like the attachment. However, the links really go to the last "real" post in the forum. I'm guessing that this is an optimization to prevent having to load the information for each forum when the main page is displayed. Basically what should happen though is that the cache should be flushed when a topic or post is deleted - or something like that.

Anyhow, not a big deal, just wanted to point it out.

It's simply because the database is cached to stop so much load for that kind of query - so it updates every like half hour or something, rather than ahving to be dynamically queried every time the homepage is requested.

No it doesn't. I just replied to a post and got an instant update on the home page.

There must be a separate DB table duplicating the information for query speed, which isn't correctly being updated when deletion occurs. Deletion occurs rarely, so this isn't for performance gain, I'd suggest it's more just an oversight. It's also one I think I've seen on another forum, so it's probably a vB bug.

Actually, I suspect that the duplication of data itself would save very very little processing if the query was optimised and the tables properly indexed in the first place - but that's a relatively groundless suspicion without seeing the DB structure.

I was under the impression data for things like that are updated for replying to a post, but not for thread deletion.

Well... yes, that's the point. But as I said, there's no reason for it to be that way. It's just an oversight, albeit one which I think is built into this version of vB by default.

Absolutely. I reported this a few days back directly to the admins and they said there's a cron job to update everything like this nightly if nothing else like posting in a forum happens to update it.