FYI ... I was seeing messages in reverse chronological order until I changed my profile from "chronological order" to "reverse chronological order", saved changes, then changed it from "reverse chronological order" to "chronological order".
Arghh ... now, with the messages displayed newest-at-the-bottom, I'm also seeing the topic lists displayed newest-at-the-bottom, with a few ancient closed threads below them.
Changed profile to topics reverse chronological order, saved, changed topics back to chronological order, saved, logged out, deleted all cookies, logged in ... still seeing topics newest-at-the-bottom as shown in my message above.
except using square brackets instead of curly brackets (I forget how to getthe square brackets to display). But use the "Peek" button on that message and see how it plopped all sorts of other code in there.