I’ve just visited your “Hot Deals” area for the first time, and I’ve looked over 5 pages of the deals.
With the way the threads are sorted, with the ones having recent replies being at the top of the heap, instead of the most recent threads that were posted being at the top, in the future I don’t think that I’ll have the patience to continue to sift through the pages of Hot Deals – as it continues to grow and grow – to try to figure out what threads I’ve already seen the title of, and what threads are new to me.
(I saw the earlier suggestion in this “support” thread of looking at the “unread” button that is up at the top of the template, but when I skim the thread titles of Hot Deals, I do not open each and every thread, I only open the ones that I am interested in, so, for me, having a list of “unread” threads is nearly the same as just looking at the jumble of threads in the Hot Deals forum itself, and that is not a workaround to not being able to sort threads by their posting date.)
I do appreciate that you are looking into the issue, and there is a plugin that is not working well with your set-up.