I've been reading the Moose for few
month, but this is the first time I saw
that the new messages notice can be
clicked.
Perhaps you can make the message appear
more "clickable" in some way so it'll
be clearer?

pre

header("Refresh: 1000000");

/pre

Make it look more like a button.
Like the little arrow after "The full story" - add some shadow below the text. Not in the exect shape of the text - more of a circle.
In this site - almost every clickable picture has shadow below. Even the submit form links. Just used this convention.