I believe Jon is tampering with a new format/layout for the forum to give it its own identity. I do think, however, that if he wasn't going to work on it over the last few days, he should have restored it as the blank space is very annoying.
Will there be any screen space left to actually display the forum messages? My resolution is set to 800x600 and the area left to display and read the forum postings appears very cramped. I now have to use the horizontal scroll bar to read the postings and that is a lot of wasted user movement.
Change is normally good but I have to question the user benefit in regards to the current redesign of this forum.
IMHO it would look better if you could lose the VBulletin banner on the top. I don't think which particular bulletin software you are using is of interest to anyone (except the script kiddies. Please people, *REAL* hackers do not vandalise websites).