To solve the issue, we actully made a custom code to get the newest and unread posts from the DB, implemented it in a page in wordpress with a shortcode. So if our members go to domain.com/newestposts/ they will now get a list with 30 of the newest and unread posts…

This works pretty well, and is what our users are used to from before.
They tend to always have a tab open in their browsers, that just shows new and unread posts – and every once in a while, they go to this tab and reload it.

To us it’s a little frustrating, because they don’t actually get to see the rest of the forum (and this type of page does not encourage posting new threads) But our users were screaming about it, so we had to do something…

The only problem is that the forum-header, with the avatar, buttons and the “other stuff” has to be hard-coded, and I don’t know if I am up to that.. but for now, the solution is OK, and our users have turned of their caps lock :p

I have already implemented it into the 5.3 core…  was just a matter of passing an argument for the popup/page – the argument already existed for the recent posts at the bottom of group view so all the data generation already existed… 

5.3 should release by end of month when WP 3.6 releases…

How great is that Looking forward to it.. nice!

me too!  WP keeps delaying their release…