Usability & links that open new tabs/windows

[silurius]

My new client is a big fan of links that open new browser tabs or windows, and we just started building a forum together that is likely to grow large very quickly. He wants all links on the forum to open new windows/tabs, which I'm cool with so long as we're talking about user posts.

Today he asked me to revise a specific forum description to include a word ("More" or "Read more") that links to a stickied thread, and he wants that to open in a different tab or window.

Personally, I'm also a fan of opening new tabs, but I dislike it when that decision is made for me. The only exception to this is user posts. If I'm still in the middle of enjoying my daily dose of browsing a given forum but want to check out someone's link, it's very important to me to keep that spot open so I can return to that post. So I don't mind at all when that decision is made for me in the case of forums.

On almost any other web page, my feeling is the opposite. It irritates me so much that I'll even go through the trouble of copying the URL to my clipboard and pasting that back into the URL bar if I know I'm on a site that does that.

So far this client and I get along pretty well and he seems to trust my judgment, but I don't think I've managed to convince him yet and he is well aware that our personal preferences are a factor.

How do I persuade him that it's generally "better" for forum links to point to the same session? Jakob answered the question succinctly here but (1) that's written for people like us and not for our clients, (2) he may not have been thinking about forums when he wrote that and (3) the article was last revised in 2007 and standards have, of course, changed a bit since then.

Hoping to get some good suggestions for how to steer the dialog from this point.

Thanks in advance!