If you take a look at my forums:
http://www.kyusho.com/kyushoforums/english/
You’ll notice the topics appear to be listed in some random order. I’ve enabled the option:
“Sort topics by most recent postings (newest first)”
In the display options, but it doesn’t not seem to have any affect.
What’s going on here?
random order? no, doubt its random… 
have you changed dates of topics or move topics/posts between forums? or imported topics?
you might try going to forum – toolbox – housekeeping and update the indexes for that forum…
I imported all these topics from a bbPress forum. I have updated indexes for that forum, it didn’t make a difference…
However, looking in the error log after I did the import and I see this:
[06-Sep-2013 01:48:40 UTC] WordPress database error You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '
post_count=0,
post_id_held=0,
post_count_held=0
WHERE topic_id=' at line 2 for query UPDATE wp_sftopics SET
post_id=,
post_count=0,
post_id_held=0,
post_count_held=0
WHERE topic_id=8443 made by require('wp-blog-header.php'), wp, WP->main, WP->parse_request, do_action_ref_array, call_user_func_array, sp_ahah_handler, include('/plugins/simple-press/admin/panel-toolbox/ahah/spa-ahah-toolbox-loader.php'), spa_save_housekeeping_data, sp_build_post_index, spdb_query
Normal and default behaviour is for topics to be listed by the date/time of their most recent post. i agree that your list – which I briefly managed to view once by the way – does not look to be sorted in such an order. To be honest, things like sort order are just so basic that I have no idea how it should be so apparently amiss. I would need to see the actual database tables for the forum to even come close to diagnosing your problem.
The error you received above is also concerning as it does seem to suggest some sort of missing data problem but again I would need to see the actual data.
I am having a lot of trouble getting things to load on your site. Not just forum pages. Many of the other pages stop half way through, never load at all, never finish loading…
Would it help if I got you an account that you could log in and see the databases? Do you think that somehow my installation is corrupted and that I’ll have to completely reinstall and reimport? I originally imported from vBulletin into bbPress, found out bbPress couldn’t do permissions the way I wanted, and imported from the bbPress into Simple:Press.
I could do the import from vBulletin directly if I had to… is there any documentation anywhere about the gotchas related with any imports? What is imported and what isn’t?
What IS imported is stated on the import form. Users, groups (if supported by the source forum), forums, topics and posts. No attachments. No private messages.
As to whether your current database may be corrupted I really wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. Something seems that it might be wrong but as I said above – I have problems with your whole site so who knows?
But yes – as I said – I would need to see the database so that I can check the data. A SQL dump would be the most helpful as then I can use desktop tools which are just so much quicker and more versatile than working over the network. Your call of course.