This is in preparation for some changes I'm planning for the forums area. I'm going to split the page in half like the homepage is. Then I will have an extra infobox place on the right for the moderators to maintain an informative message along with extra links and such-like.
This will then be able to be used to provide links to important threads, and then those threads don't have to be stickies.
Right now, many forums have quite a few stickies at the top, which means everytime you hit the page you have to first go past all the stickies before you get to the new stuff.
Additionally, we will also be able to program the system to give related links to related articles and later links to the plant database and things like that. It'll be nice.