With some pointers from a friend I will be compressing the query down to one query vs the 3 (topic, user, and post); I'll be working on this later tonight and should have it done by the weekend...
I've already made several updates to the script, but all in all I'm satisfied with it for my v0.1 lol...
Also, I neglected to mention that you can just access the script through
http://www.yoursite.tld/inc.news.php so long as you have set a default forum and a default value for max entries. You can also set it so people cannot specify a forum or the max ammount of stories...
A future version may allow for specifying a check for the max stories should it be of interest... It'd be a pain to have a user pull 5k posts afterall...