I think a little feet kissing is deserved

Anyway - selecting all the the forumid's and then doing a myqsl_num_rows on it is going to be more accurate then selecting the threadcoutn thing, which is the main difference between the two versions.

You are only selecting numbers as well, so even if you have alot of threads it isn't going to be server intensive.

I like to try to make everything accurate, so I would do it that way