Try removing public $timestamps = true; from the model and see what happens. I just created a forum and we used this and it worked wonderfully. I don't think removing that from the model is going to help, but it is worth a shot. It would seem soemthing else is going on. What does Helper::checkEdit do?

    public function updateNumViews($topic_id) {
        $post = \ForumTopics::find($topic_id);
        $post->post_views = $post->post_views + 1;
        $post->timestamps = false;
        if ($post->save()) {
            return 1;
        }

        return 0;
    }

I had just added that public $timestamps actually, thanks for pointing that out, but that's not it unfortunately.

checkEdit() just checks whether or not the user can edit the post.

Going to try adding the $id to the function and finding it that way. Will update with results.

Nope, didn't work, same issue :( thinking of trying some kind of event

Seems like event listeners worked:

Event::listen( 'thread.increment', function( $id, $timestamp )
{
    $thread = WallThread::find( $id );
    $thread->updated_at = $timestamp;
    $thread->save();
});

	public function updateViews()
	{
		$this->timestamps = false;
		$this->views = $this->views + 1;
		if ( $this->save() ) {
			Event::fire( 'thread.increment', [ $this->id, $this->updated_at ] );
		}
	}

Wow. That is pretty cool. I created an achievement system and I could totally change the way I implemented this how you have this. I love Laravel. I'm pretty new to it, so every time I turn a corner I'm learning something to help me out more!

Good job!

I am about to start an acheivement system as well, Event listeners are DEFINITELY the way to go for that :D and yes I have not looked back ever since I came across Laravel, amazing!

For increased performance you might want to look at laravel queues to postpone increments and do them in bulk. I also store my view counters in a separate lightweight db table as well. This has really cut down the io demand on my busy servers.