Right now if you see a list of topics you have to click the very specific title text to get to the topic.
My suggestion is to make the entire topic link element (generally a td) a link with a background hover of light blue so you know you can click. There’s no other items in the element to click on so why not make the whole thing a fat juicy link?
Topics which were started by pasting a URL into the title also include a direct link
If the goal is to use mouseover to imply ‘this is a big button’ then there are going to be areas where said mouseover is triggered, but the user won’t end up at the topic when they click.
There’s no parity for mobile either, due to the lack of mouseover.