My test users have requested I add a "who's online" island to the top center (above the forum, below navigation) similar to how UBB.c currently displays who's online. The reasoning is a percentage of users will disable the right and left columns out of preference, yet would still like to see who's online. Is there any way to insert proper coding either at the forum level or the style level to do this?

Rick has stated that it should be easy to place the various islands into the main content area, but i've yet to really "fiddle" with the template files or see any examples.

Sounds like some experimentation is in order hehehe.

My aim is to get my forum main page back to looking like this -

http://forums.bellaonline.com/

at the current layout, with all 300+ forums in a giant long list, it's very hard to read. I really can't re-do the entire system with subforums - as it is, many of my site moderators want subforums in their own specific areas.