I read somewhere that in Switzerland there is a famous Product Design Hochschule that has given mankind such great advances as the black-on-black appliance control panel and the knee-busting car glovebox.
I gather that they now have a new course where the best website designers of the world can learn advanced reader irritation techniques, like maximizing the amount of wasted screen space, writing with gray text on gray background, permanently displaying sidebars and menus that get used only once every solar eclipse, marking irrelevant information with animated gifs, and so on.
As far as I know, the amount of screen space (i.e. forum width) on that site is customizable by the user. Yeah, technology!
Sidebars are a fact of life. Any website on the planet designed after 2005 has one, including reddit and all modern forums. Sidebars could even contain (gasp) useful information.
Everything else, including animated gifs and gray text on gray background you are pulling out of your ass. I have not seen a single animated gif or gray text on gray background (unless you're colorblind) on that forum.