How do I ... hide posts by a particular user, unless replied to ?

[jlthomsen]

I'm working on a website that regularly creates new vB threads with a short notifications of new items (using the vB API and posting as a user called "RSS Watchdog"). Should visitors wish to comment on a story on the sites frontpage they get redirected to vBulletins thread for that particular story. That all works as planned.

However, there are a *lot* of new items coming in, which means that a lot of vB threads are created. Users who visit the forum directly should not see these threads on the forum/thread/latestposts listings/etc - unless replies have been posted. The idea being that an item is only interessting to the regular forum users at the moment someone adds their say. After that it's open season, so to speak. The first comment has to come from a user clicking the "add comment" button on the the site that does the aggregation. This will take the user directly to the vB thread created when the item was added to the system.

I tried surrounding the threadbit template with "<if condition="$thread[replycount] > 0 AND $thread[lastposter] <> 'RSS Watchdog'"> ... </if>" but of course that only works for the threadlist. Unfortunately this modification also messes up the pagenav. My current testforum has a few thousand threads and only a few of those have had replies added, so there's now a huge number of empty pages.

Any ideas on how to pull this off ? Or if it's at all possible ?