It turns out that the "rich text editor" automaticaly escapes HTML: so, instead of giving me nice neat tags, so I can link to (for example) exampleusername it translates the < to &lt; and the quote marks to &quot; and then interprets them to show the characters they code for, giving me &lt;user name=&quot;exampleusername&quot;>.

Also, it was a nuisance to enter that, because the HTML editor wants to treat HTML properly, so & lt; is read as < if I don't explicitly code for the ampersand as an entity. (The space before the l added in the interests of clarity at the expense of literalism.) Things like this are why people want a rich text editor, but I want to link to my friends sometimes.

There is probably a way of doing this in rich text, but it's not in the FAQ yet.

I have the "zap cheap effects" Firefox plug-in, but it has to be clicked every time, which means if I leave a page with something annoying like blinking text, and go back, I have to click on "zap cheap effects" again.