I checked out what this is doing, and i think it’s actually a pretty neat. In the event that a topic has more than 50 replies, it tries to give you a summarized view of all the content within them: Who replied (so you can find them faster) and all of the included links (that you might be going back to search for. In this particular post (http://realtimevfx.com/t/introduce-yourself-a-little-about-yourselves/167/), it’s a little unfortunate because the purpose of the thread is to be a mega topic, as opposed to a discussion.
It’s also worth mentioning that the system bookmarks where you left off on the discussion, so when you return, it’ll go straight to where you left off, and you need only to scroll down from that point to read all that is new.