Whoops, forgot about posting a daily discussion until pretty late today, sorry.

Simple topic since it's late: what do you think about adding "expand inline" functionality for topics that point to sites that provide embeds (like YouTube)? There's already the ability to expand text topics, and it can certainly be useful for other types as well. It's a bit dangerous for things like images though, and if we do allow it we'll need to be careful about whether it starts tilting the site towards "quick" content.

Any opinions?

It's still very rough in quite a few ways, but lack of comment reply notifications has definitely been one of the biggest missing features, so I wanted to get this basic form of it out before I worry about fixing some of the weirdness with it.

A few quick notes on it:

• Currently, notifications are only for replies to comments. You won't get any notifications for replies to topics, username mentions, etc.
• Currently, you can only view the unread notifications. Once you mark one as read, it'll be gone with no way to see it again. It's still stored and viewing read notifications will definitely be possible in the future, just not yet.
• There are some strange interactions between the comment visit-tracking and the notifications still, I'm not totally sure how I'm going to handle those yet.

Let me know if you notice anything else, I'll probably apply some more updates to it before long to fix some of the strange aspects.

I've made a couple of fairly minor changes to sorting for topic listings recently:

• pulled the sorting options (most votes, most comments, newest) out of a dropdown list and made them into tabs, to make it easier to switch between them
• added an "all time" option to the time-period dropdown

The default sorting on the site is also still currently set to "newest" since the activity is low, and I think that's the best way to make sure new posts are getting seen.

I'm also planning to add a sort along the lines of "recent activity" where it will behave like a forum - new topics still come in at the top of the list, but any time a topic gets a new comment it moves back up to the top as well. This will mean that active topics stay near the top, instead of gradually being pushed down by new ones, regardless of how active they are.

Any thoughts on that idea or the other changes? Once I do add the "activity" sort, do you think that's a better option as the default for now, or should I stick with "newest" (or even switch to one of the others)? Any other suggestions or ideas for different sorting methods?

Edit: I decided to change it from "Recent activity" to just "Activity".

As mentioned in the post over the weekend, I've added a new sorting option now: "recent activity". This behaves kind of like a forum, where active topics (ones getting new comments) will keep coming back up to the top of the list. I haven't added any specific protections like @cfabbro suggested in that thread, but I will if it seems necessary to prevent excessive "bumping".

I'm considering making this the default sort while the site's overall activity is still pretty low, but haven't done it just yet. Let me know what you think of it, and if you notice any weirdness.