The new forums moved to a system called discourse giving us some modern features lacking on the old forums. Such as notifcations, emoji, ability to put links/images in posts etc.
It comes with a trust system which is really just a passive system that rewards frequent visitors with a few minor perks (if you can call them that).
Most is explained in the pinned FAQ Pachimari wrote when we first moved over. Discourse also has a broader explanation of how the trust levels work and what options are open to those using their message forum system.
Trusted sites can be linked from level 2. Trust level 2 can be reached very quickly. People can still do links if they type in the url, highlight it and use the </> preformatted text button. Links appear like www.demonstration.com.
The dislike option didn’t actually last very long on the previous forum system. It was only live for a very short period of time because people used it to show disagreement and Blizzard had intended it as a reporting feature. Blue post confirming that:-
Correct.
To reiterate the information provided by Ornyx:
Yes the forums were recently changed to remove the downvoting function.
We originally added this feature as a means for players to assist with forum moderation by upvoting helpful posts and downvoting inappropriate or toxic posts. In practice, however, we found that it was primarily being used for things like downvoting a post simply because they disagreed with it, which was not the intent, and too often led to different opinions getting unfairly buried. Moving to an upvotes-only environment will remove this unintended abuse, while still allowing players to give recognition to posts that have a positive impact on the World of Warcraft community.
As a reminder, you can still report inappropriate or abusive posts to the moderation team by selecting the “Report Post” option located in the dropdown menu on the right of the offending post.
https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17616112621?page=5#post-98