There's a number of things you can do to make your shout messages more fun and interesting:
Links - Just enter a web page URL and it will automatically turn it into a clickable link
Thumbnails - Just enter an image URL and it will automatically turn it into a thumbnail
YouTube thumbnail links - Underneath the youtube video click 'share'. Copy the link and paste it in your shout message
The system also recognizes UBB code which you can enter into your shout messages:
[ url][ /url]
[ url=][ /url]
[ mail][ /mail]
[ mail=][ /mail]
[ img][ /img]
[ quote][ /quote]
[ b]< bold text>[ /b]
[ i][ /i]
[ u][ /u]
[ center][ /center]
[ color=][ /color]
* To show the UBB code here I've had to add white space between the brackets e.g. [ url], but you'll need to remove this
* Replace the text in the angle brackets with your URLs etc. e.g. replace with
webpage.com* Accepted colors are: black, blue, brown, cyan, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, orange, purple, red, silver, violet, white, yellow
You can also do combinations, so a clickable thumbnail image is:
[ url=][ img][ /img][ /url]
To learn a bit more on how to write UBB code see the following web page:
forums.somethingawful.com/misc.php