1. Anyone else notice an occasional/sporadic lag in load time when you click Active Topics / Past 24 hours. Is it the board or the server?
So far I haven't noticed any lag or slow loading. When you get this can you note the page generation times at the bottom?
2. I noticed when you click the Active Topics link, it is considered a search, so you are limited to how often you can click the link. Can you adjust that setting for your users? Active topics is a popular way users see what's new.
Right now the time limit setting just uses the search setting. So if you lower this it will apply to the active topics as well. When reading through the active topics, at the bottom of each page there is a link to return to the search results, so it doesn't actually have to run the search again.
3. (This may eliminate question 2.) Is the Active Topics page automatically updated, without the user having to refresh the page or re-click the link?
No, this is one thing that can't be cached. The reason being that different users may have access to different forums. So what user A sees as their active topics may be totally different than what user B sees.
Eventually I'd like to redo the active topics to make it a little more flexible and seperate it from a true search.
