I currently keep up with things through several methods:

1) I watch my "Subscribed Threads" to see what's new in the threads I've responded (or that I've found interesting enough to subscribe to).

2) I scan the titles of the "New Posts" to see what's interesting, but 90+% of the new posts are in forums that I'll probably never have an interest in. Plus, if it's been more than an hour, there are probably 5 or 10 or more pages of new posts. It's easy to miss things I might be interested in and a bit overwhelming and time-wasting.

3) I go through the 10 forums or so that I'm interested in (one at a time) and scan the new posts there. This is more efficient (especially if it's been a day or more), but I basically have to do it once for each forum.

I'd love to have a way to combine #2 and #3 and be able to view "New Posts" restricted to just forums that I've specified. I've tried building a search query to do that and I've come close (when you specify multiple forums, it just does the first or last one listed) but just can't find anything that works exactly right.

If I've missed a feature that lets me do this, please let me know. If vBulletin could be easily modded to do this, I think it would be very useful to many people.