Just a general observation:

It was this way on my vB site, it is this way on my IPS site: All my regular users just hang around on the View New Content page all the time. They have that as a bookmark and just reload it over and over again. It makes sense. This is where all new content comes together and this is what they are interested in.

But considering this, it's surprising that this page is by default “just” a search results page and all the blocks, plugins, hooks and whatnot are meant for the board index or the IP.Content pages. But the regular users don't like to look at the board index, do they? The main space there is covered by the forum list - something that hardly changes.

So, shouldn't the View New Content page have more portal-like features (sidebar/block options and the like)?

In my case I started to just put IP.Content blocks in the search results template, but I was wondering if more native options would be a good thing for future versions. What do you think?

I think that's why there are so many recent topic/posts mods. Basically everyone wants to see what's new instead of looking at the board index.