In my opinion its a better way to handle everything, not just ads. If it was only about ads I would have stuck the 160 wide skyscrapers in and walked away.
I have done that, except for enabling the option to altogether remove it.But even with all of that, if there's a way to minimize the size of the sidebar without degrading it's overall purpose (informational, nothing more), than you should DO that. You don't make the sidebar look nicer at the expense of actual forum content.
I have responded to that at least 3 times. Its not my fault you haven't read it.And we still haven't received a response on the requests to make the sidebar applicable to forums and not threads. Is that impossible, defeats the advertising function, or something else?
Post #87 in this thread would be the most recent response to that, but there are numerous others as well.
I am not going to go from this project to reworking every single css file on vBulletin. There are hundreds of them.It's not minimized, it's just not maximized. It's around 525px wide, and it's not impossible to prevent: just use min-width in your CSS to force certain elements to be at least a certain width.