I think this is what the /top page is for. Did you want to make /top your default homepage?
http://discuss.howtogeek.com/top
(we aren’t showing Top as nav right now because Computer Help takes up a lot of space .. we could remove Starred, Unread, etc, something.)
The only downside is that this could lead to a “rich get richer” problem where only the popular topics ever get replies and most other topics are kind of ignored. But if the article comment areas are linked directly from HTG proper that might be OK since there is a way to deep link to the topics from the front page which gets a lot of traffic.