Yeah it's a Wedge thing, in fact it's an SMF thing (the popular forum system which I contributed to back in 2008-2010, before I split from the team and built Wedge with another quitter.) Back then I only changed that feature to show ALL unread replies instead of unread replies since your last visit (and by last visit it can be as little as an hour), which made more sense to me, but I didn't change anything else because the queries are so awfully complex. They also generate a temporary heap table and a filesort for half of them, so it's really really easy to end up with a query that takes a while to run. It isn't the case right now because the forum isn't big enough and the server is fast enough, but I'm not ready to take my chances & do that query on every single page. I don't know. I could do it on the homepage, though. But it'd create a disruption in the sidebar between the homepage version and the other pages' version. Then again, the homepage sidebar already has more details than on other pages, IIRC. I don't know, what do you guys think?