User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-4193424-20170102212627/@comment-26339491-20170103210411

Thanks for your detailed feedback!

I can address some of the points you bring up: We're already planning on tying the wiki and Discussions closer together through design and navigation elements. That should make it easier for Discussions users to discover the rest of the wiki and vice versa, and give them a more unified identity.

Re: Trending and why posts are sorted the way they're sorted: The posts under Trending are picked and sorted by an algorithm based on how long ago this thread was started, how many replies it received, and, with less weight, how many upvotes. The the posts under Trending tend to be recent ones with more replies.

There isn't a "sort by recent reply" feature as such, but the feed of posts that you follow is sorted by recent reply. You can also add a Discussions feed comparable to the wiki's Recent Activity to your community, if you'd like to have an activity feed for new Discussions posts. More on that here.

The point you bring up about the Discussions feed widget vs. the automatic Discussions footer is a good one. That's worth thinking about, since a double Discussions feed isn't ideal, and I'll pass your feedback on to our Discussions team.

Notifications: We're planning to add on-site notifications for Discussions so that you'll be notified about new posts in Discussions just as you were for forums. We'll also add more options to the notification emails that you can already subscribe to. That should help make it easier to stay up-to-date on your Discussions activity in the long term!