Gosh, I feel a bit silly now. @Therese, thank you for the insight. And @Katie2, sorry for any confusion. Always learning!
For future reference, here’s some info I wish I’d known before 
:
-
The TH forums use a program called Discourse. Discourse uses something called “trust levels”: Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
-
We all start at Trust 0. According to the link above, one thing Trust 0 can’t do is:
- Have actual links in the ‘about me’ field of their profile (will be silently and temporarily converted to plain text)
-
When we get to Trust 1, we earn the “Basic” badge and get an automatic message:
-
After getting to Trust 1 and earning the Basic badge, any links in our profile should work.
-
How to get to Trust 1? The link above says the default is:
- Entering at least 5 topics
- Reading at least 30 posts
- Spend a total of 10 minutes reading posts