QUOTE:

I may be new here, but your comment about other forums is so completely opposite the truth it's not even funny. I join a lot of forums (pertaining to some of my interests) and have been a member of quite a few for almost 10-13 years. Links, videos, hyperlinks, photos, allowed.

Agreed. Linking to obviously commercial material is spam. Linking to sites that provide quality content (since TJC is probably unlikely to host all the content users wish to upload-- they don't even host their own videos) is allowed, and even encouraged, on most forums. This is the first forum I have joined where linking to public works (that don't breach copyright) that add to the conversation is disallowed. If a user wants to know a good place to start learning Japanese, is all we can say "check out videos at [site] and buy books from [popular online bookstore]"? The weird thing is-- I was able to post my comment, link and all, but when petina saw it ('moderated it?', and saw that it was just YouTube (and therefore unlikely to be spam (or worse)), it was still considered bad. So the work went in to discover if the content was bad, and it wasn't, but it's still a no-no.

"How do I pronounce this in Japanese?"
"Let me whip out my phonetic alphabet for you. Oh wait, TJC doesn't support most non-unicode characters anyway. I'll just make an approximation."

I understand the spam issue-- I do-- I've administrated a forum before, and we used to get spam daily (even with CAPTCHA-- though a good CAPTCHA system prevents everything but manual sign-ups). There were maybe... 5 of us(?) getting rid of the spam, and it could take a little while. Still, not allowing links prevented us from posting news, videos and other interesting tidbits. To be frank, not allowing links degrades the forum as a whole.

I'm going to try installing FireBoard on my server to see if there's anything that might help Eric out a bit.