I have seen on many forums that they are not allowed active links on the forums, I just want to know that the active links are leaving bad impact of the site on search engines or they just block users to get traffic.
Basically such forums want to avoid spam. When they allow active links, many people will drop links with poor quality posts. I'm sure you've seen people on this forum who make a point of leaving short one sentence replies on many posts. When they allow active links, they have to monitor each and every link to ensure that they are not linking to a spammy or bad neighborhood website. Those links also drain some of a site's internal PR that could instead go to other internal pages.
More and more forums are going to nofollow links, or rewriting links to go through their website, like wickedfire does (not sure on the reasoning for this). Nofollow links just protect the site, and might discourage spammers a bit.
People who are doing this kind of stuffs are the ones who wants to deliver visitors to their sites through spamming forums with live links. And most of the forums don't want this to happen, that's the reason why they not allowed such actions like that.
BECAUSE YOU DIDNT READ THE FAQ/RULES , Anyways its good learning curve you are not exception , many learn same way Please read Rules of links and post in FAQ/Rules http://forums.digitalpoint.com/faq.php Thanks
I think they reason is, they just wanted to generate good traffic from their users but they didn't want to share the good fortune. But I'm not saying that all the forums is just like them. I was just mentioning some and the possibilities.