I was having a look in the google webmaster tools thingo and I said I had 86 links to my site. They all come from a forum where a link to my site comes up next to my posts. Would this be a good thing when it comes to PR? And one more thing, there is a site with a link to mine and it has been crawled since my link was there - and it shows up in the cached version of the page, but the link doesn't show up in webmaster tools. Is that normal?
@ question 1: a link is still a link, therefore it's always a good thing. @ question 2: maybe the hyperlink is tagged as "no follow" that's why it doesn't show up in webmaster tools.
Agreed, don't think these count as 86 links though Google DOES show nofollow links in it's Webmaster Tools backlinks overview, it's probably just that it hasn't updated the links to your site yet.
Google doesn't show the links to your website immediately after you have secured them. It first takes time for Google to consider the links which are then finally shown as links to your website.