Is this located on the homepage of the forum, or all through the forum?
Exclusively on the index page, unless there's another secret page out there. The problem is, you need to first start ignoring boards to cater to your specific interests since I'm sure most people wouldn't like seeing constant bounty spam in the "recent posts" section.
I'm still not entirely sure what you're after: you want a notification for when boards are updated? One has the ability to notify their email address when a new topic is created within a given board and if you're looking for purely newly-unread posts, then the image option I explained above should work perfectly fine.
What else do we need?