This was a purposeful change - if you want to random ToT again you can go to the news page and click the link from there. Maybe we can add a widget to make it easier from the sidebar.

Without the prevention it just ends up being a page that people set up auto timers on without actually interacting with the page.

Yes, you need to refresh the news page/profile/etc so that it generates a new valid link. As said, this was done to prevent cheating, and we are looking into better solutions in the meantime.

Locking as this is not a bug.