New Posts

They aren't really the same thing. The "last 10 posts" list at the bottom of the index page is exactly that, direct links to the last (latest) 10 posts made on the forum, based upon what your account can see for forum sections, and the category selection of forums that you have picked for that display.

The "New Posts" link is a search results page that shows a list of threads that contain posts that are "new to you" (i.e. that include unread posts for your account or session). If there are 5 new posts in a single thread, this search result display just shows that the thread has new posts but not how many. If there are 5 posts in a row to a single thread, you can see that in the last 10 posts display.

Some people who are constantly active on the forum use the last 10 posts display to see new posts, real-time as they are made. The direct link takes you right to the posts themselves. Other people like to update "New Posts" (or for guests "Today's Posts") to see what threads have had activity since the last time they refreshed. While each have a concept of new or unread, they are not the same and have different uses based on what a person prefers to see.

 

Our posting rate is fast, but, not that fast. The last 10 posts aren't ever really gone in seconds. In fact, during slow periods, the list of last 10 posts can span a half hour or more. During fast posting times, they can span just a couple minutes though.

As for making the list longer, that's just not the way its coded. That display section is not standard vBulletin. We coded that ourselves to be like what we had on the YaBB-SE forum, which was the forum software we used before buying vBulletin. People were used to the last 10 posts in YaBB, so, we made that modification prior to going live and converting our database to vBulletin. Anyway, retreiving the last 10 posts is not cheap in resources, so it's a cachable list that members can share. If we allow member selectable longer lists, it would take more resources. Not really worth the processing power.