[quote=@Captain Jordan]
I really hope that's not going to bite you in the ass once the database has accumulated a high amount of posts/convos. Deletes are going to be a bitch if that happens.
[/quote]

It scales because it's incremental at the same cost whether there are 2 posts or 1,000,000 posts in the topic.

[quote=@LegendBegins]
So it essentially generates "pages" based on the number of posts to display, while no true pages are being generated, but simply a number of posts to display before breaking forward, which is why you can't go back? Because there's theoretically no place to go back to?
[/quote]

Yeah, pretty much. 

If you hover over your "Next" button on recent-posts, you can see that it's passing in the ID of the last post on the current page.

I could probably implement the "Previous" button as the inverse. Probably in the time I've been talking about it here. :lol