View active topics is broken

The View active topics link for this board doesn't work. That is the way to read phpBB boards in my experience, and I use it one very other one I frequent. The alternatives that work here all only show topics with unread posts in them. This is terrible if I want to go back and read a recent topic; I'm left trying to find where it was among all the subforums, and usually just give up since it's not worth the effort.

I haven't seen any mention of this being broken. Does nobody else ever use it?

I don't use it, but after your post, I tried to figure out why this might be the case.
If I set it to show all topics, the only two topics that show up are in the NESdev Middle East section of the forum...

When it's working it shows all topics that have posts within the last N days (7 days by default), with the most recently posted ones at the top. Any with unread posts have an orange bubble, otherwise empty bubble. So you can read any unread posts, or re-read ones you've already read. Maybe you have more time to read some day, so you go back to less-recent active topics. The feature allows you to focus on the active topics of the board all in one place, so spend a minimum of time dealing with the board's UI.

Interesting that you found it shows a couple of posts if you set to put no date limit. Maybe that'll point to the cause of it not working.

The reason is here:

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=1875595

See the 2nd post (from Kevin Clark).

The forum here runs 3.0.10, but upon review of the per-forum settings (there are only 3 forums -- "NES/Famicom", "Other", and "Site Issues"), it was determined that the "Enable active topics" feature was set to No for all of them. I believe this must be the phpBB default when migrating from 2.x to 3.x.

You then have to go into each individual "board" (e.g. for "Site Issues", the "phpBB Issues" board, the "Web Issues" board, etc.) and set the same field to "Yes". I'm in the process of doing that now (will take me some time), and will post a follow-up when finished.

Done.

Now "View active topics" is returning lots of stuff. The only forum which does not have this enabled is the Moderation forum (because I don't know if the "View active topics" capability takes into consideration a users' access level, i.e. I don't want non-moderators potentially seeing threads in the Moderation forum).

I'm locking this topic since we've fixed this (thanks blargg!) and will update the known issues thread with an appropriate item.