How the heck did FinnAgain do this in this post?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12136887&postcount=32
If you click on “Edit” you can usually see how someone built something. And you can always test it out in ATMB if you need to make a practice post.
In this case he simply put the URL in the quote tag, like this:
[noparse][
](http://www.straightdope.com/)It’s taking longer than we thought.[/noparse]
Which gives you
[
](http://www.straightdope.com/)It’s taking longer than we thought.
(Learn something new every day if you’re not careful.)
Note: Regular users can’t use “edit” on another person’s post (or on their own, after more than five minutes). Try using “quote,” which will put everything, including the coding, into the reply box for you to examine at your leisure.
That is true. My oops.
Ah, I hadn’t noticed that the entired quoted text was a link. I was thinking there was some way to have just the word “Quote:” preceding the text be a link. Makes more sense now.
<nevermind>
You can embed links into smileys, too 
Important note, the url tags must go outside the quote tags. Otherwise you don’t get clean text inside a box that’s a link, you get a bunch of underlined text in the box and it’s annoying.
Umm… this is weird; when I first go to such a page such as the link in the OP, the text is clean. But if I preview or otherwise go to another page and then return, the text is all underlined.
That is weird, never had that happen to me.
Which browser do you use? I had that problem on IE7, I think it was.
Makes me wonder, can we embed a link in our shiny new titles? I don’t want to try it without asking first lest it come out all weird and code-y.