@Robert, @Sofy, can you share the solution provided to @labradorman in preventing what looks to be html encoding of special chars when integrate this ...

@Robert, thank you for assurance posting isn't broken. Have reinstated 1.6.2 and patched it to fix the title brackets issue.

Any ETA for a fix or a pointer to the offending code? Found the splitted off topic:/p>

Thank you for the update. Noticed that square brackets are being stripped from topic titles prior to saving them in the DB. Can this be reinstated or...

@Robert, asis a closed topic, I'll post the question here. I enabled log-queries-not-using-indexes=1 in /etc/my.cnf and see a stack of unindexed mysql...

@robert , have upgraded from mySQL 5.6 to 5.7. After 12 hrs of operation, the topic pagination has remained. So tentatively appears to have solved the...

Yes, we have Light Speed cache active. Disabling it isn't an option so the workaround posted above works for us.

Add comments like shown in class-posts.php. The side effect is any private posts will now be public: // else{//If doesn't have "View Private Posts" ac...

Spoke too soon. The problem persists and the only working workaround is to comment out the offending code in class-posts.php. More details at:

Yes, deleted/disabled cache. Makes no difference.

Yes, did that. It fixes topic pagination until a topic has a new post in it and then it's back to permanently disappearing. So I've altered class-po...

Spoke too soon. A new topic reply will once again kill topic pagination until the same cpanel SQL command as below is applied. Have to go back to my c...

@antonM, that indeed got topic pagination back that is maintained even after new posts are added to the DB. thank you so much. 

This fix worked until a new topic/post is made whereby the pagination disappears again. Have reverted back to the class-posts.php mod as shown at: