The link maker thingie works exactly the way it's supposed to.

It makes a link of whatever address you put in as the URL. This should be exactly what shows in the address bar when you go there.

In this case, it's http://www.goilin.com/
The http:// is what tells a browser to go to another site. If you leave it off, browsers will look for the page on the site they already have open - Mudcat. That's where the extra bits came from - it defaulted to the Mudcat server and automatically stuck them in.

It can make it a lot easier to type links in. If you're making a link to a Mudcat thread, you don't have to type in 'http://www.mudcat.org/' because people already have gotten that far.
If you make a link to a message within a thread, as I do below, you don't have to type in the 'http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?ThreadID=53814" (or whatever the number is) because people are already in that thread. For the link below, I just entered '#830502' - the message number.

Martin's link up there in this post works now.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled program programme.