If you have posts with lots of linebreaks the Active Topics page won't look very attractive. I prefer replacing the linebreaks with spaces.

line 185 of activetopics.inc.php:
PHP Code
$topics[$i]['post_body'] = substr(strip_tags($post_body,'<br>'),0,250);
replacement:
PHP Code
$topics[$i]['post_body'] = substr(str_replace("<br />","&nbsp; ",strip_tags($post_body,'<br>')),0,250);

##eek##