Spot on, Flecc. I doubt many Pedelec Forum users bother much with Twitter.
Tweetboard is supposed to be used to get people to follow the site owner's tweets about his site and for people to see threaded lists of comments in response to the owner's tweet. EG Russ tweets "This is a great new bike", against a forum board posting about the new bike. The tweet then spreads virally via the people who are following Russ. Soon the whole twitter world might in principle know about the posting on the forum - this would generate tremendous traffic for the forum -- at least that seems to be the general idea to judge from these three video reviews I found of tweetboard.
Russ: It should be possible to set up on the users' control panels for them to be able to switch off this add-on for V Bulletin. Better still, dump it all together unless you really do see a future in such microforum/microblogging activity.
The masking of text is only for those operating on low resolution screens such as 800 x 600. This site was designed for 1024 and above.
I am just trialling its use at present and I notice on Tweetboard's site they have started implementing an option to turn the feature off at the user level so I will probably end up disabling it until this has been done.
I do most of my browsing on a netbook using XP and Chrome as the browser. Resolution 1024. The Tweets button obscures text on my machine as well. In general, the sophisticated appearance of the newly designed website is too busy for me. It detracts from the content and the experience.