slow query

We have a rather large phpBB site, and our server crashed due to slow queries piling up. We traced it down to a query in the “updated topics” widget in this plugin.

To solve it we changed the query in class.wp.w3all-phpbb.php

from:

SELECT * FROM ".$config["table_prefix"]."posts, ".$config["table_prefix"]."topics
WHERE (SELECT MAX(topic_last_post_time) FROM ".$config["table_prefix"]."topics
WHERE topic_visibility = 1)
AND ".$config["table_prefix"]."topics.forum_id NOT IN(".$no_forums_list.")
AND ".$config["table_prefix"]."posts.post_id = ".$config["table_prefix"]."topics.topic_last_post_id
AND ".$config["table_prefix"]."posts.topic_id = ".$config["table_prefix"]."topics.topic_id
AND ".$config["table_prefix"]."posts.post_visibility = 1
ORDER BY post_time DESC LIMIT 0,$ntopics

to:

SELECT T.*, P.* FROM ".$config["table_prefix"]."topics AS T, ".$config["table_prefix"]."posts AS P
WHERE T.topic_visibility = 1
AND T.forum_id NOT IN(".$no_forums_list.")
AND T.topic_last_post_id = P.post_id
AND P.post_visibility = 1
ORDER BY T.topic_last_post_time DESC LIMIT 0,$ntopics

and were wondering if it would be a good idea to change this in the official plugin as well? There are a couple of different variant of the query being used in the plugin, I think they would all need this changed?