Lots of posts have non-descriptive titles (e.g., “Honest Question,” “I love this!,” “Observation”). How hard is it to make it so hovering your mouse over the title displays the beginning of the post? Then I don’t have to click into posts that don’t interest me. As it is, I just skip them if I can’t tell what it’s about from the title. I’ll bet I miss some things that might be interesting, though.
Funny that when I make this new post, it gives me tips for making a good post title. Perhaps making that message appear for longer than just users’ first original post would solve the problem.
Twenty page loads (with associated images) to determine that I don’t care about ten threads is a bit much. Those thread get added to my recently viewed list, and the new message indicator (which currently only shows up for threads I’m reading) becomes useless. I guess if you read every thread anyway, it’s no big deal. That’s probably not sustainable if the board ever grows.
Other alternatives would be to show the first couple of lines in preview under each thread title (see, e.g., reddit) or have a preview option that expands a portion of the first post without leaving the main page.