In my effort to make it easier to follow topics, CougarBoard now supports hashtags. If you put a hashtag in a post, it will make it a link that will show all recent posts with that hashtag. If you start typing a hashtag in a post, and that hashtag has been used before, it will give you auto-complete suggestions.

If you don't care about hashtags, then don't use them. I'm personally not much of a hashtag user, but I can see how they would be useful for following topics. Consider this an experiment to see how useful they are.