We're going to be having a large live event in our forums in a few weeks. We are having a celebrity posting responses to posts. We have done this before and the one thing we find is that users sit in the forumdisplay page and keep hitting refresh until the next question comes up. As you can imagine, this can bring our server to a complete halt.

After seeing that great showthread optimization, I thought I would see if anyone out there can do the same for forumdisplay.php.

Also, if anyone has any good suggestions for making this event run smoother (no, I don't want it in a chat room), than I'd love to hear those as well.

would it at all help if you had a non-vb page show a 'last active thread' type of simple list for each forum ?

making sure members know about it etc... and urging them to use that instead... i'd imagine it would have less mysql queries that a whole forumdisplay page.