dedfft If by visual editing style you mean a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, I can't remember if there are any that exist right now. You can see what your response will look like when replying to a discussion, but not when creating a discussion (that will come in the future).
Stuck logging in with GitHub might be a bug, it has always worked for me so I'm not sure there.
You won't get email notifications by default, if I remember correctly. You have to go to your Settings page to enable email notifications.