Ah I see - in phpMyAdmin 
Thanks for editing the queries for testing.
In phpMyAdmin where the mybb forum resides, those queries work just fine! I get my correct count of users, the user list, post count, and posts list.
So the queries look ok.
And, if I add puts '', total_count into mybb.rb, after that mysql query is executed, I see the correct result. So the query is working from remote as well.
