yes, it is by design, so Googlebot sees a link to 'Active topics' directly and will index your latest posts that way.
having the hidden pull-downs defeated SEO, so the search goes to advanced and is normally hidden for guests ( bots too ).
to mitigage the quick search, just add it to a sidebar as an island.
the goal is to have all direct links on the top navbar with no blanks ( javascript popup ), like before.
