I feel I have to say I like the URL shortening and don't see the point of displaying it all. (that is a -1 on turning off URL shorting...)

If you want the url, just right click it and copy it to clipboard.

Or point at it and let your browser display it if you just want to read it...

Long urls in messages breaks the flow, and looks terrible, and I would hate having to check if I need to shorten my url before posting...

How often do you really need to see the full url compared to all the cases where you just don't care?

In my book, always.

The forum supports text links as well, and I'd suggest you always use text links unless you have a very good reason to display the raw URL...

That is a good point.

Though, this assumes all poster knows about the tags needed, and is disciplined enough to use them.

I find it to be more user friendly, and will mean a generally better looking forum, if "no extra tags" still means the output will look ok, even if I paste a 1k url.

If you really need to show off the fancy url (how often do you really need to do this?) you could always do a text link with the url as text...

A URL is meant to be descriptive and tell you something about the resource. I personally get tired of clicking bit.ly links or similar only to discover I've already been there, or worse, that I've ended up on a site I didn't want to be on. It wastes my time. If the price is to have slightly less perfectly formatted posts, I'm happy to pay that price.

I can't tell if I've visited a site by looking at one individual's arbitrary description of it. The URL is a unique identifier that gives me a very good idea of whether I've visited it before or not. It also gives me a good idea of the authorship and type of content, if I know much about the site in question.

Ok, I withdraw my opposition :)

I do agree that the URL shortening was a bit too aggressive, could have allowed a bit longer URLs (like max one line or so).

But people here is probably sensible enough to not fill their post with insane URLs, so turning it off should be ok.