AS the mozilla sidebar seems more suited to more "dynamic" things, perhaps it shouldn't have the news on it. Maybe truncated listings of the subjects of new message board postings (with links to said postings) would fit, and *maybe* something like the number of people on tpu.org (or even their names). Clarification for "truncated": probably the first 10 letters (not including spaces) and the rest of the last word there, so "Your evil ad system" would become "Your evil ad", "Learning Shells.... anyone have shells to offer to members" would become "Learning Shells". From my brief survey, that would (mostly) come up with meaningful and short names. As well, a bit of javascript that removes the links from the sidebar as soon as they've been clicked would be nice, but that's probably asking a bit much.

The major thing I would like to see is the TPU sidebar refresh itself every once in a while...

As for JavaScript... all I can say is it is evil, but I will not go into that rant right now.