Yeah, I'm confused too. I'm sure Rabbit1 will explain why things are the way they are here, but some of the rules are against all those I've experienced on other websites and I'm struggling to understand the rationale.

I'm Admin for a different type of public forum and I positively encourage hotlinking to things like Photobucket rather than uploading pics to that forum, after all that's the raison d'etre behind Photobucket so I don't understand why that is discouraged, most other websites for the same sport encourage it too. And I've never had a problem with clickable links in peoples posts, I would understand not allowing links which take people away from this site, eg to other bdsm sites, ( I ask people not to post links to similar sites too) but I've seen bondage.com posted in the past week so that doesn't seem to be a problem, but if we're discouraged from posting full URLs then, mea culpa, I've posted several links to the BBC news site, and if it's against forum rules then Rabbit will be hopping mad
(Sorry couldn't resist that, I'll get me coat... )

EDIT: damn! Too slow, the bunny beat me to it