Check the forum for new posts

[jj2007]

I've recently noted that the New posts function behaves strangely. Sometimes it shows many posts, in other moments none. After midnight, there are usually no posts at all. [EDIT] This post, for example, does not appear any more in "New Posts" ten minutes after I posted it.

There is Active topics in the three horizontal lines menu under the horse logo, to the left. It finds no active topics right now...

Yesterday, I implemented a "forum watcher" for the Masm32 forum. It runs minimised, but if there is a new post, it pops up and shows me the last 9 posts. I would like to do the same for the FreeBasic forum, but there is no "recent posts" function here. There is only the "New posts" function, and that one a) misbehaves and b) can't be accessed outside of a browser.

The search function works without being logged in, but it is very limited. For example, a Google search for site:freebasic.net "#include" works perfectly, it returns indeed all posts that have code in it - but they are old, very old.

A forum search for "#include", OTOH, returns all posts that have include in it, but it doesn't need to be #include. Pretty useless.

Any ideas how to grab the most recent posts without being logged in?

[badidea]

I have never seen any items under 'Active topics'.

The issue with 'New posts' I think is that posts of new users (first post) does not show up. Examples recently: TwoCatsYelling and khaldrogo.
I expect that this has something to do with anti-spam measures. First time posts need to be approved by an admin first?

[jj2007]

Yes, I also noticed the TwoCatsYelling and khaldrogo examples. I will try from now on to use search.php?search_id=unreadposts as my "FB homepage", it seems to work more reliably.

But again, this works only if you are logged in; while I am indeed logged in with my browser, the "external" download grabs the page for non-users. Which is not helpful for my little project (which works fine for the Masm32 site).