Are the stickies really a problem? Do they take up that much space? Having them at the top of the forum post make them visible to everyone entering the thread. Many, if not most websites you visit place ads on the side of their pages (including ATP) and people tend to block that area out when viewing a page. I could see if a forum was posting numerous stickies that where taking up a lot of space, but none of those mention had more that two. The fact that stickies don't have a lot of replies should not be a problem since they were not designed to be replied to, but rather a place to store info that you don't want to get buried. As a matter of fact if they were on going threads that received a lot of replies there would be no reason to make them stickies since each new reply would bump it to the top.
