The point of is to avoid accidental exposure by the fact that the link isn’t show in the forums as an active URL link; so they have to do something else to actually get to the site/url.

Some of your examples that you give and consider bad/failed, don’t actually go to the site in the url. There are many ways so that the url is displayed as text and not an active link and it doesn’t need to be munged in multiple locations for it to be a text based url that isn’t active (click-able and goes to the correct url)…