Found a great little Greasemonkey script for making the forums a little more readable. It shows/hides the Actions panel on the right side of the screen to give more real estate to the messages.
If you don't have Greasemonkey installed you can get it here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
The show/hide script is found here:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46297