Thanks for the quick reply.
I used to mod forums and CMS’s before WP existed and have not done much since… so I ‘get it’ but don’t know enough to just whip up a bunch of code. haven’t touched PHP but can get through HTML. Would editing the file not also change the layout etc of other pages within the theme or is the forum using something dedicated to it and it only? Essentially, I need to make the forum look like an existing site and change the header at minimum.