>>404
That's not really ideal for multiple reasons. First, why are you using PHP when Wakaba is written in Perl? Second, depending on how many threads you have you could be hitting the database hundreds of times for each user that views the page.

On a side note, thanks to your code, I remembered that my board's thread list does what you wanted, so I thought it might be a good idea to share my code with you, but as I read through I realized I made the same exact mistake as you. Wakaba has a sub routine called count_posts already built in, and I was calling it for each thread