Welcome text

I am not sure about allowing removing it completely, we'll need to discuss that. How about us reducing the margins of white space above and below it?

removing the margins and reducing text size would be a start of course, but my opinion is that you should think about users who spend a lot of time on the forum (and those are the ones modifying their homepage). and to us regulars there's so much more useful stuff i could do with the screen real estate... it's great for everybody who gets here the first time to be properly welcomed but i think there needs to be a moment when we can focus on work...

removing the margins and reducing text size would be a start of course, but my opinion is that you should think about users who spend a lot of time on the forum (and those are the ones modifying their homepage). and to us regulars there's so much more useful stuff i could do with the screen real estate... it's great for everybody who gets here the first time to be properly welcomed but i think there needs to be a moment when we can focus on work...

Your comments are valuable and duly noted.

We have some plans for that space in the future that could change what appears in that space.

As I said, this is something we'll need to discuss and maybe we can allow you to remove it until those changes appear later.

Just move your widgets to the top of the page.  If you place them above the welcome text you can actually bury all that unneeded stuff out of sight.  I reproduced those widgets I like, buried all the unwanted stuff and it's almost usable.  

As Ueli has mentioned - this format is not conducive to actually doing work.

thank you patrick, helpful as always. tried moving the welcome text which doesn't work but didn't realise that other widgets will move the text. thx