Occasionally, I'll follow someone's link and it drops me back to a login page. For example,
BentNotTwisted's post at 10-23-2003 04:35 PM in the
Banned members thread. I suspect that
BNT has set "browse board with cookies" to no, and therefore the link that he provided can't be followed by anyone else.
I don't know if anything can be done about this, but I thought it was worth mentioning.