Question The left margin needs to be a little wider.

The sidebars, left and right, are relative to the total width of your screen. So, yes... if you use an 800 width pixel resolution, you will need to 'zoom out' twice (using control - ) to get your left sidebar menu to look 'right.' It'll probably take more to handle right side because of the length of article names.

But I'm going to be blunt because people keep coming back to these display issues. I don't design for 'one size fits all' ... web site standards left 800x600 screens a LONG time ago. I've built the basic layout of this site to serve people 'best' in a landscape/widescreen format with at least 1280x720 resolution. But it will work without significant reshaping down to 800x600 ish if you zoom out a bit... once at 1024x768, and again at 800x600. Below that? No, it doesn't work well. The Google ads we're running are based on desktop resolutions, not on mobile devices. Forums software in general is not intended for display and use on mobiles. And the types of menu structures and access to site content that a site needs to create for mobiles is generally vastly different.

That's why most companies with strong online presences have TWO or more sites, to detect smaller displays/mobile devices... and they have specially designed sites (usually much more limited to keep the overall site map less complicated/cleaner) for people visiting with mobiles. Or apps.

I don't have an IT department. At the moment, my focus is on security. Second priority is getting the old content loaded. Third is getting up all the help and how to articles necessary to stop people from asking how to do something ten times a day. 4th is providing new content. Fifth is recovering the old forums in archive and/or reference material formats.

And that still falls on my priority list... where?

Well, most of the people with problems with the sidebar widths are people with smart phone pixel resolutions... in which case, dedicating 160 px wide to mandatory width is actually the opposite of what they want. What 'really' needs to happen for mobiles is a single menu panel that can 'hide' off screen until needed with no 'sidebars' at all... and no large ads (or none at all) so the full screen space is viable forum/reading width. And even that will work better with landscape than portrait (for some reason people still use devices in portrait mode). But THAT requires a completely separate site template. If someone wants to create that Joomla site template and not charge me several hundred dollars for permission to use and modify it... go for it. I know what it needs, I just only have so much time to work on it.

Having run the site for years, I know what issues can pop up. When I was running it, I was always trying to design the pages to be viewed by the most people. I wanted the stories to be like reading from a book. Granted an ebook now. But I was following an axiom of keeping it simple. I only put ads on the top and bottom of the forum simply because it would cause the least headaches for me.

Now for the flip side. All that "Keep it simple" made for a ton of work on my part. The new site is an overall improvement over the old one because the writers don't have to work directly with the web admins to get their content posted. They can submit it ask it to be edited if needed and then we can schedule the post ahead of time. Regularity of posting keeps fans interested and this new site promotes that. Sure there are going to be bumps in the road. We'll work through them.

Trust me when I say I know that help sheets and FAQ's would be useful. If you were able to see unpublished documents, you would discover that placeholders for those things already exist in the FAQ/Help section. But they ALSO require things to be stable... should I spend two hours writing out explanations and how to deal with the site as it is now when the next eight hours of work I spend on the site could render those documents inaccurate/useless?

Everything takes time. Seriously. A site like this generally takes an IT team MONTHS to build and test before it is opened. I personally spent a week on the core basics, invited the canon authors, spent another week getting security tweaked and the basics imported while they poked around and got a feel for how to set up a story and do some editing and gave me some simple functionality feedback (Warren helped with some technical/admin details), and then opened this after two weeks of work... and it has now been open for one week. Three weeks 98% of the design/development work done by 1 person. One person who is also working 40+ hr work weeks at a paying job and only does the site setup after a full day of work. This site is open in the state it is currently in only because the alternative (no forums at all) would be worse.

I love you all and I appreciate that you all want the site to feel like home again... but unless you are a professional Joomla coder/administrator able to solve permissions problems in your sleep; your advice is about six weeks too early to be listened to seriously. I have, literally, more than two hundred hours of work on my 'to do list' before I'll even consider everything officially set up. And that list does NOT count the time it will take the team to import all the old stories or recover some of our forums data in some sort of historical archive/posting.

If your page loads in a chaotic order making it impossible to actually use the site? If your login loads you into something that looks nothing like the site? If your forum posts are being filled with encrypted text.? Then please let me know. Otherwise, let's just pretend the Suggestion forum is a placeholder for later...