It sounds like you have activated the SP Admin Bar plugin but are not using it. The admin bar plugin gives you a simple UI to check and read every post your forum receives but you do have to mark them as read. You are not doing this so the postbag count of posts is building up. This will slow down your site as well.

When you open the admin bar there is a button over on the right to empty the postbag. I would suggest you use that and then decide whether you want to keep the plugin active or not. Little point in having it active if you are not using it!

YS, thank you for your reply and solution which worked.

I had enabled the Admin Bar plugin and was using it until one day it disappeared. I did not know why it wasn’t showing up anymore.

Your reply reminded me of it and where to find the settings. Now that its showing up again, I will keep it for awhile but will disable it should I not need to use it later.

By the way, on another matter, how do I change the breadcrumb design for the forum? The current one on my site shows each subforum on a different line, which takes up a lot of screen space. Your breadcrumb is on one line and looks much neater. Is this a special design or one that is already availble within the forum plugin?

Now SP is displayed using templates it is easy to make changes to the display. But you do need to edit the template file.

The breadcrumbs are displayed in the spHead.php template which you will find in your sp theme folder. Yiou can  edit this with the theme editor in th4e forum admin.

Find the call to display the breadcrumbs. It probably looks like this:

sp_BreadCrumbs('tagClass=spLeft spBreadCrumbs&tree=1', __sp('Home'));

Simply change the tree=1 to tree=0 and that will do it. On this site the breadcrumbs have a custom styling as well.

As always we recommend that you create your own SP theme so that any customisation is not lost during a future update. (http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/themes/theme-basics/creating-a-theme/)

Thank you for the info on the breadcrumbs.

Coming back to the admin bar, if I disabled the plugin, how would I receive notifications when I need to modrerate new posts by new members? I’ve set the condition that the first couple of posts by newly-registered members need to be moderated.

Well that IS what the admin bar is really good for. There are also email notifications for admins available of course. The best policy – I would have thought – would be to use the admin bar but if you do then you do need to remember to check every post and mark it as dealt with.