IDEA: Allowing sorting by both popular and chronological order? (+ widescreen formatting?)

The discussions would become extremely versatile by allowing discussions to be sorted by popularity AND chronologically.

The left-hand pane could be upvoted discussions as it is now. The right-hand pane (under Sub-Communities) could display several of the most recent discussions.

A toggle (or option in profiles) could reverse this behavior: the left-hand pane can show discussions in chronological order, with the right-hand pane showing several of the most popular discussions. A profile option could also define how many discussions appear in the right-hand pane.

These preferences would also apply to comments inside a discussion, which allows users to choose what method of sorting is most important to them.

Also, would it be possible to add a profile option to define monitor width? It seems there's a lot of screen real estate on the sides of widescreen monitors that could be put to good use: Sub-communities and Beta Feedback could be placed in a third column, and if there's still space, perhaps Stickies/Pinned Discussions could be placed in yet another column...

In addition, selecting/excluding discussions from certain sub-forums on the front page would be useful.