Topic navigation in the message boards is page based. This means that the links for First, Previous, Next, and Last refer to the pages of content that you are viewing.

For example, if you are viewing the list of topics and sort them by rating so that the highest rated topics are first in the list, the first page contains the highest rated topics and the "next" page contains the next 20 highest rated topics. Similarly, if you re-sort the list so that the lowest rated topics appear on the first page, clicking "Next" displays the second lowest rated topics and the last page displays the highest.

Just remember that whenever you sort the list of topics, you will start on the first page.