On the board’s main page (boards.straightdope.com), it shows a list of forums along with the last thread in each forum to have a post made to it.
But the links to individual threads from that page have the “?goto=newpost” parameter on them, which seems counterintuitive to me. Generally, if you are tracking a thread, you have a subscription to it, and so you find that thread through user CP. It’s relatively unusual that you would track threads you’ve been reading through the forum’s start page (where it would just be coincidence that a thread you’ve been reading was listed).
Sometimes I will go to the start page and think “oh, that thread looks interesting” and click it - only because I’m reading a thread I haven’t read before, the “goto=newpost” feature takes me to the last post instead of the first one. So generally I either have to go back to page 1, or at least scroll up to the top in order to get to the first post. Often the goto=newpost feature doesn’t even work right in threads where I have indeed read them in the past - I get sent to the last post in many cases there too. Since there’s a little blue arrow next to the link which also takes you to the last post in the thread post, this is often redundant.
Unless my behavior is atypical, I would suggest having the links from that page simply open the thread normally, so that it starts on the first post of the thread.
Of course another option would be to take users who haven’t entered a thread before (and hence have no post where they left off to go to) to start at the beginning of the thread rather than the end when they open it, which would actually improve several aspects of browsing the board.