[Schoelle]

David, the most interesting feature for me would be the automatic (ajax?) driven update of the sidebar block or a separate, collapsable box in the forum.
Similar like a shoutbox, but only for these updates
The alternative would be to extend the features of e.g. the MGC Shoutbox. There you can have new threads or replies to threads displayed in the shoutbox. But this can get messy.

So a seperate box that you could easily adjust in its height would be perfect!
If this box would just be 4 or 5 lines in heigt you could always see what is going on in the forum without having to press F5 all the time.
We have some times where we get a lot of support questions and our goal is to answer very fast. So this would just be awesome if this could refresh automatically.
Maybe this block could - optionally - be in two columns where you could define what to show in which column.
Maybe Threads and replies in one column and status updates and other stuff in the other column.

Just thinking loud now