I agree entirely. I have seen some phenomenal TR's that are on other websites besides FT, and it would be a shame to miss them. On the other hand, I can see how the FT purists really want to keep the TRs themselves on FT, which is totally understandable.

I will agree with others in that writing a TR takes a lot of work. It can be a tremendous time sink, and to keep re-writing a TR for each separate website can be extremely painful. I can make a lot of sense to just write the TR once, and link it from other forums.

My suggestion is to try to have our cake & eat it too. Create two forums:

1) one specifically for FT-based trip reports with no linking to outside blogs

2) one TR forum dedicated to outside blogs/links, etc

People who don't want to read these outside links never have to click on them; they can only read the FT-specific TRs. People who want to make sure they see what's out there and not miss anything, just go to the subforum that has only links to outside websites. I think this subdivision breaks it up, sort of how OMNI and OMNI/PR have been broken up. If you want to go there, click the link. If you don't, just ignore it.