This is in regards to threads created in forums that must have topic approval from a moderator. I am fairly certain the phpbb development team never intended on moderators replying to unapproved topics, but if they do reply to an unapproved topic (the phpbb system allows that) then it incorrectly marks the forum as unread for everybody.

On our board we reply to unapproved topics for internal reasons before making the decision on whether we should approve the topic or not. However a negative side effect from this is the fact that moderators posts are "approved" which makes the system update the "forum_last_post_time" mysql variable.

I was trying to think of ways to fix this problem and there are a few solutions I can think of.

First solution is to make it so that anybody who responds to an unapproved topic do not update the "forum_last_post_time" variable. That would fix the problem for the majority. however that would cause a new problem for the fact that the tracking would then be incorrect for moderators as the topic unread flag would not show then.

Another solution would be to not allow anybody to reply to unapproved topics – that would force the problem to never happen (don't really care for that fix).

The last solution I can think of would be to revamp the tracking system by putting in another mysql variable like "forum_last_unapproved_post_time" or something along those lines so that two different timestamps get updated depending on if the topic is approved or not. In this case only members of the board with permission to see unapproved posts would be using the "forum_last_unapproved_post_time" timestamp in figuring their forum tracking unread status. Everyone else would use "forum_last_post_time" in figuring their forum unread status.