User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: October 17, 2016/@comment-5146399-20161018221911/@comment-126761-20161019142658

This seems to have been unintentional (we're looking into it) - but the feature itself has been deprecated and essentially pointless for a while now. We removed the main feature of it (opening links in a new tab) back in April, so it just made normal links since then. Current usages can and should be switched to normal link code.