I have a border around the online feature indicator under every member's name and avatar when they post. How can I remove this border from appearing please as it doesn't look nice

On here it looks right, there is a small border but on mine I have the smilie face in a box and the text eg Online in a box ie two columns.

This box utilizes the t_standard class in the style settings; just removing the border value isn't an option as it'll effect a LOT of tables; you'd have to manually edit it out of the showflat.tpl and showthreaded.tpl files.

I'm hoping that in the future Rick seperates out some classes so they can be further tweaked (the online box, pagination boxes, wol, active topics, search results, etc)

In his case the border is caused by the alt-1 and alt-2 class - definitely would cause lots of issues to change them. They'll need to be edited in the templates

well, FWICT he wants to edit the outside border, not the cell borders; the outside border is controlled by the t_standard class from what I can see

What class effects the background of what's inside the online indicator box?

.leftalt-1

Yep, it will depend on what column you have it in. Left column, leftalt-1, right column it would be rightalt-1.

Some customizations are harder to users who haven't been introduced to CSS before, such as adding a left border on the offline box, but if you do that it effects left-alt1; so i had to customize it a bit further with referancing td's (which is beyond the skillset of newcomers to css). Same thing with the box where "top" is, had to just go in and add another class to the template :x

Yes CSS is very slick but also as you say, a PITA at times with all the methods and hacks required for different browsers.

funny thing is, this is why organizations like the W3C where created...

Well the United Nations was created to "prevent wars" seems we still have quite a few going on

Each browser out there has issues of one type or another bar none.

As soon as you think you have something looking good you find out it looks like junk in one of the other browsers so you have to make changes or add hacks so it looks the way you want it.

If your life/work is creating Websites it's probably a piece of cake, but if you just dabble in it or do it once in a great while it is annoying.