Post installation

I want any user to be able to create a topic in my forums. However, I do not want them to be able to promote these topics to the front page. How do I do that?

I'd like my list of upcoming events to show the date rather than the number of days till it takes place, and also not to show what type of event it is (our site is a church website that distinguishes between "General Events" and "Congregational Events"). Any suggestions as to how to configure this?

Thanks.

I have been working with drupal for several months now, and have gone through most of the handbooks. I realize that this should be a pretty easy solution, but for some reason how to do it is escaping me.

I have written a snippet that lists links to the containers of the forum. It works OK on my installation of drupal but not the persons that I wrote it for. I am using the following line but am not exactly sure whether I am using it correctly.

$containers = variable_get("forum_containers", "");

I just installed flexinode, and I love it, but this is what I want to do and am still a noob at this- I created a new node with regions I defined, but at this time each region when output sits on its own line. How do I change the look of the output if say I want several fields output in one line or the data split into 2 columns for that type of node, etc? Where do I even go to start this?

Hi.
When you go ot "Administrator | Blocks", you can set their weight.
Does anyone know if there's a difference between negative weight (eg -3) & positive weight (eg 5)?
Thanks.