I've obviously tried to search for this but didn't find anything. An idea comes from another online game with extensive chat use:

Any www.something.xy/whatever links could be active

so you can click and open the associated application (browser, image viewer...). Would have sense mostly in windowed mode. Since there is the copy/paste feature already, it would make sense for the forum links for example, which are mostly too long to write by hand...

Tinyurl is your friend for long url. If you use firefox, there is an extension to create tinyurl (tinyurl.com) from current page and copy it to clipboard
Very handful!