Yes, it would perhaps be nice to have a field in the composition window for inserting hot links and perhaps even formatting. Jarrod's certainly thought of that before.

For referencing other bb posts there's the copy/paste function as I noted. The Hotmail web page insert feature you mention is nice, but there's a fair bit of logic going on there to automatically title and label the link plus it uses a lot of real estate.

What would probably be simplest to implement would be to have any URL reference text found in a post to be automatically displayed as a hot link, much the way email clients do. For the poster that would mean a bit of typing to indicate what you're referring to, followed by a quick copy/paste from your browser address bar to insert the HTTP address. For the viewer it would be a single click to jump to it. I think that would make a huge difference for the average submitter and viewer, I know it would for me. All user input HTML should be prevented. That would also make it much safer in that an embedded reference to a hostile URL couldn't be hidden in a post disguised as a hot link using a seemingly benign title -oops I might be giving someone ideas there.

Getting much fancier than that would likely make for a lot of embedded script.

I'd also like to see that quote, less-than, greater-than display problem in the post title fixed.
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Dave -940's, prev 740/240/140/120