Then I was misconstrued as to the original purpose of the original (informal Doper-derived) “rule” in question. I thought we stopped doing that because it would alert the “target” and cause them to come over to the Pit Trolling thread and gum it up (if they did not know about the existence and purpose of said thread of course, which would be true for authentic newbies but likely not for returning socks). I recall several examples of that happening early on in the original Troll thread’s existence, which soon resulted in everyone not linking anymore.
The other issue is that people will often make just indirect non-specific references to the (non-Pit) thread and the offending poster and their posts (“Hey, anybody get a gander at that new guy trolling in the Israel thread?”), forcing anybody who wasn’t aware of said instances to have to scour the entire board trying to deduce which subforum and then thread it was in, if not which specific poster it is–and forget trying to track down the specific posts in question. With a direct link there would typically be no such guesswork required. People have gotten a BIT better about this lately, with the exact (unlinked) names of the thread and poster often now provided.
I guess, then, that it isn’t possible to disable links of this sort from going back to a specific subforum? Have no posts from the Pit ever get displayed as links in non-Pit threads, and poof no more issues, unless I missed something here.