Re: <a> tags for players
The player could send it to you and you could edit the post with the proper anchor tag.
It's frustrating, but is a "full link" really that distracting at the end of a post? We do that a lot in my games, both where I GM and where I don't, if someone wants to reference a picture that would be too large to put in a post or a video with music in it and no one has complained about it in the past.