it is definitely because of the growing number of admin posts, because it grabs them all and then filters all of them based on forums you can see for the pagination (to know how many pages)

hmm. i might change that to a next/previous. ALL MY BUG FIXIN' TONIGHT CERTAINLY ISN'T HELPING MATTERS IN THIS DEPARTMENT ;)

it is loading all of the posts, which is actually the problem.

the first two pages are blank BECAUSE of the posts that are filtered out. that never stopped happening, because a lot of staff make posts in staff forums as official posts. filtering on the admin posts page will always be a thing. usually it just makes each page have somewhere between like 30-40 posts instead of the 50 that actually get grabbed, but it's definitely possible for all 50 to be filtered out.. i have been looking into solutions for this but haven't found a good one yet.

also first posts of topics have never shown up in admin posts because they're all made as normal posts (note that the post you linked does not have the red bar that is indicative of our "official" posts that end up on the admin posts page) and as of the time i'm typing this, we don't have the ability to change a post from normal to admin or vice versa after it's made (that's in the works, though!).

Pretty sure this has been fixed? :P