TL:DR, because the site was designed by an escaped asylum patient who apparently thought removing the mute or ignore function was a good idea because ‘you should talk to each other’ when whole boards of the forums are notorious for being toxic cesspools where anything goes. But in a more direct answer to your question, when a huge chunk of the players got access to a Beta, I think it was Battle for Azeroth (or maybe even Legion?), everybody who was given access to the Beta were all given Trust Level 3 so they could link screenshots and videos of the issues they found on the Forums, and the Forum Mods have only just now gotten around to correcting that mistake, gutting a huge number of people from Trust Level 3 and busting them down a grade without warning.
If you’ve ever had a suspension, be it from being spammed by alternate characters from a fully maxed out account who hated that you didn’t comply with their head-canon, played a race they didn’t like or supported LGBTQ+, or a real actual complaint about a violation of the ToS, there’s a good chance you’ll never get it back again.
I got a silence 5 months ago and won’t be able to start ‘grinding’ for Trust Level 3 till the end of next month. And that’s assuming I’m not perma-blocked from this because of the aforementioned asylum-escaping creator.
I’ve got:
1.9k days visited
39 days read time
17 hours recent read time (I’m home recovering from radiotherapy and I can’t sleep from the nerves)
2.6k topics viewed
104k posts read
6.7k likes given
7.3k likes received
221 topics created
3.1k posts created
That should, unless the radiotherapy is messing me up more than I thought, be enough to re-qualify for Trust Level 3 when that 6 month probation period ends, but there’s also no guarantee that the way the forums are designed that anyone who has been silenced, or more serious punishments on the Forums, will even be able to re-qualify for the Trust Level 3 status.
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Ah, I was wondering why I was back to Trust 2. I did have Beta access to some darn thing so I guess that was it.
Nice of them to warn us lol.
Here’s hoping something that happened before this version of the forums even existed doesn’t ruin it for me.
Reading over it, it shouldn’t. I just have to do extra work to his some ludicrous arbitrary requirements(20k posts read), though I’m doing well on the ones that actually have anything to do with trust.
Plenty of websites with discussion forums have few most used and popular websites links allowed by default, for ex. Giphy / YT / Tenor / Imgbb / Imgur, just to name a few. Those websites are used by majority to post GIFs and Videos.
I don’t see WHY can’t Blizz do the same and allow links for those few website at lower Trust Level. 
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They do, that’s why you can link to wowhead.
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And Wowhead is a popular free images and videos sharing site, right? 
Wasn’t claiming it is, just pointing out they have the tools to do what you were proposing.
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Okay so I was really hoping that you would wake up after all the complaints like you eventually do and I would not have to post here. I’m not a complaint poster that whines about every little thing you do, I just run my guild and recruit raiders as I enjoy mythic raiding. Unfortunately it seems that you think that people want to be on the forums just randomly liking other people’s posts and clicking on hundreds and hundreds of them each month just to prove we are not a bot/spam.
No offense but the forums are not interesting enough to do all you ask just to stay rank 3. Length of time and approved sites should also be a consideration in it since many have been on the forums for years.
The main issue at the moment (and by browsing the complaints here… Yet still don’t qualify for rank 3 
) is for the people who are trying to recruit. Even websites that we have to actually log in using blizzard ID can’t be linked. (WOWAUDIT, GuildOfWow, etc.) Which is asinine.
Can you please reconsider the outrageous guidelines for the people who have a damn life outside of wow. This is not X. All most of us are trying to do in the recruitment forum is link characters, logs or guild applications to find decent people so that we can have a successful mythic raid.
Thank you.