To be honest it probably depends on your php skills. It IS possible now but it would require custom coding. This might actually be something we could help with in a future update by making it an optional alternative.
I guess the reason I personally prefer the popup is it means I do not have to keep loading up a page to look at the list but have it available from anywhere and can then navigate to a topic quicker.

Yea I can see the benefits but it’s quite different to how forums normally work so it’s thrown some of my users.

I prefer the older more usual way of displaying the new posts, so an option for this in future releases would be great. Might help people transition more over to SP from more established forum solutions.

I’ll work at customising it’s look and position and see if that sways me more.

My knowledge of PHP is simply to fiddle with the code from the WP-Admin and if it works it works, if it breaks I revert back to the code how it was before and leave it alone 

SO you do know that the same list (constrained by the limit you select) IS shown on the front page – yes?

At the same time i will open a ticket to investigate if this could be made a viable option

Ah yes, it displays to guests and users not logged in… hmm OK, maybe I could copy the code that uses and build a static page?

You would be on the right track in that the list view template would be used. And I guess if you wanted to could place a filter on the new posts popup button to change it’s function. Take a look around at the code.
As I said – I have opened a ticket to see if we could build this in as an argument to the button call.