After a great deal of looking around and being unable to find anything, I've decided to lean on the excellent support staff here for some much needed aid and assistance.
All I'm trying to do is modify the ssi_boardnews feature so that it doesn't display the message icon (since it only displays text, not the icon image itself), and to edit the size of the thread subject so it appears more like a proper header.
Every attempt I've made seems to end badly since me and arrays don't seem to mix well :'( any help would be much appreciated.
Well, firstly, if you provide all the parameters to ssi_boardNews, the last one is $output_method, which you can provide as 'array' to get an array of data back rather than letting it do the output.
That way you can style the information exactly how you want... But without knowing exactly what you want I can't really suggest what that should look like yet.