1) Should be fixed in build 002.
2) This behavior difference is intentional since 4.1.0 Alpha 1.
- The RecentChanges list is in historical order.
- The activity widget is not intended to be historically accurate, but rather to constantly bump things that are active. The activity widget does not actually order the original content, but a different table where activity is tracked (vw_activity). Typically, this gains entries when content becomes visible, which in the case of approved content is not necessarily when the underlying content was posted. Multiple entries for the same content can stack in some cases, showing only one entry with the most recent activity time. This prevents a problem where moderated things that took a while to approve were already stale by the time they were approved (like if a moderator takes 2 months to approve it) and never got deserved attention in activity, per
https://www.vaultwiki.org/issues/4269/
As for the activity not using timezones, the bug was actually:
When VaultWiki is active, all content (including non-wiki content) using XenForo's xf:date template syntax does not consider the user's time zone. Content that calculates the date using XenForo's language->date functions directly does consider the user's time zone. The result is an inconsistent calculation of times.
This was due to a timing problem where VaultWiki was attempting to add callbacks to the XenForo templater before it was setup. This resulted in the templater getting instantiated before the XenForo language was setup (so no timezone yet) and inheriting the incomplete language settings.
The timezone problem will be fixed in the next Alpha/Beta.