Here's how I do it. It comes out looking like Danny's example.
Any time, you don't understand anything I'm saying, just ask. I start a reply message, then realize I want to post a link to a previous message. I don't want to lose my place, so I open a second instance of my browser, navigate to TBN. Now I have 2 copies of TBN open. I navigate to the post I want to paste, click on the browser's address box to highlight it, and click ^C (cntrl + c) to copy it. You could close the 2nd instance now, you're done with it. I then click back to the reply message, and click the "URL" tag in the Instant Markup section under the reply. That brings up a text box which already has "http://" in it. I click in that box, which highlights the stuff already there, which will get replaced when I paste. I then click ^V to paste and hit ENTER. That brings up a second text box where you can type in a shortcut "title" for the link. Hit ENTER again, and the link is inserted in your reply.
It still looks like gobbledygook, so when your message is done and you click "Continue", be sure to scroll up and preview your link to see if it looks OK. The click to submit your reply. Being basically paranoid, at this point I usually go to my message and test the link to make sure I did it right. If I screwed up, I use the "Edit" feature and try to repair it, byu deleting the link and starting all over again. Using the copy and paste method, though, it almost always works.
Good luck.
PS: Ever wonder how ^V got to be the symbol for paste? Way back in the early days of personal computers, the first really successful word processing program was WordStar. They used a lot of control keys (no mouses yet). They stayed away from function keys, like some of the others used, because it was harder to remember which F-key did what. Instead, as much as possible, they used mnemonics to remember the control keys. ^C for "Copy" was obvious. But, with only 26 letters and a lot of functions, they had to get a little more devious. So, ^X became "Cut", based on 2 theories -- you were "Xing out" the text being cut, but the actual truth was that to the programmers, an "X" reminded them of scissors. As for the ^V, if you remember back to the days of typewriters and handwriting, when you edited a draft, and realized you wanted to insert something, you either used a caret "^" or a reverse caret "v" to indicate where you wanted the insert to go. Since with computers the caret ^ already was shorthand for the CNTRL key, that left the "v" to indicate an insert - which is what happens when you paste something. WordStar was so widespread it became the defacto standard and is still used today.
More useless knowledge dredged from the so-called brain of a nerd... /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif
