[Reeve of shinra]

I'm not sure what your using for your front page, but assuming were talking about a general forum your first method wouldn't work for a lot of reasons I dont care to explain atm.

Your second method could work. Submitted by and approved by stuff is a template edit more or less. Just add a field to your db in the corresponding table called "approved_by" or something. Then edit the right vbfiles to pass the variable on into that field and retrieve in your news script.