Check it out. It can be done.

RDL2004

A Vanilla forum that actually resembles a normal forum. No ridiculous wide margins, no voting, no tags, and no side column. Aside from some graphical stuff, it actually looks and is arranged similarly to the old Parallax forums.

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/

yeti

That find sure needs a much more sensational, yelling, jumping, blinking, ... title line!!!

Heater.

I wonder what they talk about over there?  

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

I actually like this forum -- modified with Stylish, that is -- better.
BTW, when reading text, there is such a thing as too wide. The reason is that when the eye reaches the end of a line, it's easier to find the beginning of the next line if it's not too far away. That's why newspaper and magazine articles are printed in columns.
-Phil

Dr_Acula

That penny arcade forum looks *much* better!

erco

Like like like.

GordonMcComb

Except it's not responsive. So, Google will flag it as "unfriendly to mobile users," whether it really is or not.
It IS possible to have both responsive and an enhanced UI. I've seen several Vanilla forums that managed both. A good CSS coder could turn the Penny Arcade theme into a responsive design in a day. I forget what framework this theme uses. (Incidentally, this one still has broken CSS. Someone added the top nav bar outside of a container row, so it does not properly flow. I guess they'll fix it eventually.)
On all of the Vanilla sites I'm visiting, search is terrible. Win some, lose some.

Tor

Gordon - what does "responsive" mean in this context? I mean, it "responds" when I click on stuff.. so I suppose the term has some specific meaning in web terminology?

-Tor

Heater.

The  "resonsive" Gorden is talking about is a term used to describe creating web pages that adapt their layout, resizing elements, rearranging elements, hiding elements etc, depending on the size of the display window of your browser. 
A responsive page will tastefully arrange itself and be usable on a small  smartphone screen or on you giant TV. 
As an example tale a look at   https://www.raspberrypi.org/ On a typical desktop sized browser window there are menu buttons in a horizontal bar at the top. Now resize that browser to a very small window. Notice how that nav bar disappears, replaced by a "hambuger" button on the right. Hit the hamburger button and those menu button appear vertically  stacked. Many other elements on that page will have moved around and changed with window size as well. 
"responsive" is a fairly recent new phrase that came to web developers with the new features of HTML5 and CSS. Amazingly it does not require JS to do this dynamic resizing and rearranging of the elements. 
Learn about responsive web design here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_responsive.asp

Tor

The raspberrypi web page is the worst I have seen in a while, so I hope that is not the standard we're looking for. It's not zoomable, which makes it terrible for mobile devices. It's full of images which makes it slow as molasses. It's bad in every way on my 10" tablet as well as on my mobile phone.

-Tor

Heater.

Tor,
Ha, I did not say it was a good example  
I too often find I would rather have the regular page layout on my little Samsung Galaxy than the "mobile" layout. Being able to pinch and zoom and pan around get's the view you want and often makes things big enough to actually read!
I have never understood why mobile layouts are often not zoomable. Why is that? I'm guessing the idea is to make the web page look and feel like a native mobile application.
Many have complained that the Raspi site is image heavy and slow to load. Although strangely on my Galaxy, on my connection, it seems to load acceptably fast.
Perhaps this page is a better example of the intended idea of responsiveness: https://blogs.endjin.com/2013/04/example-responsive-layout-using-bootstrap/