For whatever reason, if you post the address of a link in the first post it does not automatically convert it to clickable html. If you do so is a subsequent post (as "shibumi" did) it does it for you.
Not defending TR3 but there are a few minor quirks to FR...
He’s not that stupid. He posted hot links to his own website (since removed by Admin - Thanks!) and then put a cold link to the video, so that you’d click the blog link rather than the video link.
Think about it. You have to actually put some HTML into your post to make a posted link cold. There’s no text in post #1. So it was done on purpose.