Some of our participants print and share their copies of Brigada with others. If the “real” link is hidden behind a one word “click here,” those printed pages aren’t much good. In order to convey meaning, the entire original URL needs to appear as text. Besides — we have a longstanding belief that dates all the way back to our founding that our readers deserve to be informed more honestly about where that link will take them. It’s “truth in clicking.”
I would hope that your readers are clever enough to know that the link you click on is a shortcut to were you are going, e.g. the link I clicked on to get here is NOT what is written on the page. It is in fact the following:
http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=74136987&msgid=746133&act=5DKM&c=485762&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brigada.org%2F2014%2F09%2F21_14847
More to the point is do I trust Brigada to take me to a safe reliable bit of the internet where I won’t be sold anything I don’t want or worse. Even though I didn’t know who click.icptrack.com was I trusted you enough to click on your link. I think I can trust you to shorten your links to make it readable too.
Thank Steve — But that doesn’t solve the problem of people who PRINT Brigada and pass it along.