It's not the new post indicators alone, those are fine. It's showing the total # of new posts in each forum. Didn't even know VB had this option, at least they didn't before
I know of one other forum that has the feature and they have the same type of warning...use at your own risk
There is no way to optimize this query. To show the total # of new posts, it has to do a query to count every post that is newer than your last visit timestamp. It uses an index to count, but if you have people that never visit forum A, and never mark all read, it's basically counting every post in the forum, every time they load the front page.
It's not a bad query if all of your users are active and visit pretty much every forum, as they are quick. It gets worse when you have a large number of forums where your users only visit a small portion of them.
