On reconsideration, I removed this bit from my previous post. “Don’t make links that could possibly be construed as insults,” is a bit more restrictive than I want this to be. The point is to avoid explicit (if unintentional) insults showing up in non-Pit forums, not to completely firewall the Pit off from other forums. If there’s a tangent in the Troll thread about banana bread, and someone links to a really good banana bread recipe in MPSIMS, that should be fine. Stuff that might look like an insult if someone doesn’t take the two seconds to click a link to get the context isn’t an issue.
Breaking the link was still the correct move in this specific case, because the poster being accused of trolling was also the OP of the thread where the alleged trolling was occurring. A more grey area would be something like:
Poster A starts a thread.
Poster B trolls that thread.
Poster C goes to the troll thread, links to Poster A’s OP, then says, “Poster B is trolling the fuck out of this thread.”
In that case, you’d get the back link showing up in the OP, but not on the specific post that’s being called out as trolling. I think we’d still break the link there, as you’re still calling Poster B a troll, in a non-Pit thread.