One reason I have stayed away from The Philosophy Forum over the years is because I found Vanilla's strict two-column layout cumbersome. I sought out other forums where you can use the entire screen to read and write. Alas, since The Philosophy Forum is so attractive in other ways, I finally gave in!

But I also found a great workaround for the column layout. After experimenting with four or five different options I settled on the Stylebot Extension, which is available in all variety of browsers. This is a guide for using Stylebot to simplify the layout, and it is very easy to do!

The Easy Way

1. Install the Stylebot extension for your browser
2. Download my Stylebot json settings file (link)
3. Import the settings file in Stylebot$\to$Options$\to$Sync$\to$Import

The Hard Way
(Manual instructions)

1. Install the Stylebot extension for your browser
2. Open the Stylebot extension, go to Options, click on Styles, and then click Add a new style...
3. In the "Enter URL…" space, copy and paste the following URL, including the asterisks:
   
   • thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/**
4. In the large text area, copy and paste the following CSS:

If you also want the "Start a New Discussion" page to be full-screen, then repeat steps 2-4 but for step 3 use this URL: https://thephilosophyforum.com/post/discussion**

Voila! Now all of the discussion pages will be full-screen, and all of the non-discussion pages will have the old two-column layout. To toggle the Stylebot alteration, just use the shortcut, alt+shift+t . This shortcut will add or remove the left column. You can also open the extension to disable it for this website, disable the extension itself, or delete it altogether to remove the alternative styles.

For those who are interested, Stylebot also has a preset "Readability" setting, which attempts to simplify a web page to make it more readable. A shortcut can be added to toggle the readability feature.

Cheers,
Leontiskos