Two coloum forum layout
 

I was messing about in firebug (after thinking i was doing WAY too much scrolling on vb.com) in implementing a two coloumn forum home layout (see screenshot)

It required only a small tweak to the css (also shown in screenshot) However dosn't quite produce the right results... Does anyone know of a way to specify 'float:top' in css? eg so the forums fill up vertical as well as horizontal space correctly.

sorry, it's not possible

if you do come up with a solution it will be very ugly and bloated

plus, the solution that you come up with to achieve the desired outcome will cause problems for those with smaller windows

My solution so far was just to split the forums into two separte lists and display one on the right, one on the left.

The intended 'market' for this design is people who have huge monitors (like me) and want to make more use of the screen real estate. It looks ok on a smaller monitor; but my intention would be to offer a widescreen and a regular screen skin (possibly also a cut down 'i-phone' skin.)

It would just be nice if CSS contained a float:top and a float:bottom directive. With allowed combinations of float: left top; float: left bottom; float: right bottom; and float:left bottom; The desired behaviour for each of these would be for the box in question to minimise its distance from both edges, taking into account boxes that have already been placed.

You will want to look into the property "clear". That should do what you want.

Over at edugeek.net they have a tab system which is interesting... if anyone can come up of a way of mimicking that.... AND posting a "begineers how to" would be nice (and solve this issue)

Link here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=175687

I'll be releasing the new version that works with vb4 beta4 this weekend.

It is not difficult and it can be implement without altering or splitting your forum list.
Try using a jQuery plugin called Columnizer.
This .js automatically divide the list into 2 columns similar to newspaper columns.
check here: http://welcome.totheinter.net/columnizer-jquery-plugin/