The link on the topic title serves two other purposes: It provides a “permalink” URL to the post, so it can be read without going to this board page; and by right-clicking it, you can launch the post on its own page. All the links also provide a backup for paranoid people who turn off JavaScript–you can still navigate around the site through the links, the old-fashioned way, page by page. When JavaScript’s running OK, it takes over most links so that they don’t leave the page.

At the moment I can’t think of a better way to handle it (“better” being a relative value, it’s not so good yet).

Something that may help is to automatically put “n/t” on n/t topics and replies. As it is now there’s no visual clue whether there’s a link there, and I imagine people are clicking futilely a couple of times before determining that there’s no link there. I should fix that somehow. It’s better, but not better enough.

Actually a great improvement but a loss for the hopelessly nostalgic.