I believe I know what could be causing this. Not too long ago I changed the code for login. It had been set for a long time to only show 300 new messages if someone had not visited the forum in a long time. I changed that failry recently to 50.

I think what is happening is at login, if there are more than 50 messages new, you are seeing only the first 50. I'm gonna set the number back to 300 and let's see what happens.

Missing messages would have happened before I made the change.; it just would not have been frequent or noticiable for Staff, and the average user would never notice. Why? Because to miss messages there would need to have been over 300 messages posted since your last login.

The original reason for the only showing 300, or 50, or some limited number of messages was so a new user didn't joing the forum and see a list of tens of thousands of new messages in a busy forum. My setting of 300 meant they only saw the most recent 300 as new.

Anyway, I'm going back to 300 and will look at changing the code so a new user is only showed the most recent 50 or whatever as new.

That still elaves the issue of a curen tuser who comes back after being gone for a week and some 1000 or so new messages have been posted. Maybe I should never limit the number of new messages for current users. Hummm.