I happily report the [unbelievable] news of a Correct Answer. (All in a week's work, as the saying goes.)
Here was the key:
wrote:
But I wonder: You can post all these things here. Maybe your problems has to do with a part of your content???
That got me plugging in here, test after test (as seen in the following endless litany of test Replies from me). I'd been reluctant to 'dirty' this discussion by doing so. But, oh, the value of a workbench. And here's what it came down to – believe it or not:
I had a draft, including links, including italic text [successful final Post found here]. The draft sat in Apple's TextEdit app, RTF formatted. Copy from TextEdit, Paste in Forum worked fine, as you would expect. Except for ONE thing.
The finding is, that buggy appearance of posting behavior, may be entirely attributable to buggy content in the Post. I may not have every detail correct, but it's along these lines. That ONE thing, was –– a link embedded in a character string –– that is written in italics !!! Can you believe it? In fact, it's even more obscure: "So long as that string is the output of Apple's TextEdit.app."
Solution? Opened the draft in LibreOffice Writer. Didn't change a thing. Didn't delete, then reinstate, failing links, etc. Copy from LibreOffice, Paste in Forum. I'm omitting some detail, but that's the gist.
I guess the moral of the story is –– for critical writing matters, Apple's not your go-to provider. Reminds me of all the confusion in the Acrobat Forum, around folks who think of Apple's Preview.app as a PDF document composer, editor, and configuration program. It is but a primitive image manipulation mechanism.
I thank all of you for your patient and generous assistance. I see that, 18 minutes ago, is right on target with what I just rattled on about. And hey, , sorry about hijacking your picture along the way. I admired your remedy!
Cheers,
BR