I have created several forum topics that have an external feed,

that is posts are inserted to them from outside of the forum which works well.

However I am running in to problems with post count and lastest posts. Here is what I have tried is there something I am missing.

I insert or update the following

All fields in posts table filled post id auto increment, forum id, topic id, poster id, poster name, post text, post ip, and status set to 3. (This works without a problem)

update topics table, topic last post id, posts count, topic last post time,
update table forums, posts count

However when i view the forum none of the counts are displayed and also latest discussion is not displaying the topic as having any new post.

Am I missing something to have the external post counted and updated in latest discussion, and the forum post counts?

I didn't understand your problem completely, however I think you need to update fields like "topics_count", "posts_count" in "forums" table, and similar fields in "topics" table, using count(*) function or something like that. It's not happening automatically... mySQL has no triggers ;-)

Yeah solved my bad, I had left an unwanted , in the code so wasnt updating the fields.

Ok then. Be sure you have no SQL errors, debugging your requests ;-)