It's planned, but if you really need that now it's not that much more complicated to open said thread in a new tab and directly close it without reading.
o did I put it live already? Well glad it works then. It's only for links input by people with text/bbcode, not menu etc. And it's all of them even internal site links, I find that extremely inconvenient but I guess that's why it's user option.
I will not make it open in a new by default, it's not even worth trying to argue, as others have said it is extremely easy to ask the browser to open in new, while the inverse is not, not to mention some browser might not have tabs or the ability to open new window at all. This is entirely on the user part, it shouldn't be forced in any way.
User profile option could indeed be appropriate for this.
Well I appreciate your concerns, but the decision has been long taken, and for having the experience of how it worked on GR I can tell you modding to our needs is not as easy as it looks, and comes with a lot of constrains too.
As for the domains we need to see with ntd, I know he got some of them but I don't remember which, and now that you posted about it, if we don't have coh3.org yet it might be taken already.