Have your friend consider this perhaps?
Magic OGP (extension) does away with the legacy old URL, converting it into a live-link...with the title and with the help of
SEO Metadata. The latter dishes up to 160 characters of such URL linked post.
You simply drop the URL into the post as text and leave it to Magic OGP and SEO Metadata to work their magic. Thus, if you don't want them to work their magic, just leave the URLs enclosed in the URL tags.
But wait, it gets better!
If there's an attached or linked image greater than 200 x 200 pixels in the post being linked by URL, SEO Metadata can add it to your post's background code as a
Meta OG:Image link as the page is being viewed, which Magic OGP will identify on the fly and add to the live link it produces! So instead of a boring old URL or a truncated URL in a topic post with text, like we've all seen on PHPBB for 20 years, these two extensions can completely modernize the look of an entire forum, turning those links into what you might consider to be a social media style graphical box...
- with an image
- the topic's title
- and up to some text characters from that post
...
which is also now a clickable URL link to those posts.
These two will also do this within posts for external URLs as well for sites that support Open Graph Protocol, which most modern Web sites do...which after installation, your site will as well for links posted externally.
But wait, it gets better!
Even if there isn't an image in the post being generated by Magic OGP, SEO Metadata can use a default image that you set. So no matter what the post URL has in it, the resulting Magic OGP clickable link will contain an image, like your forum's branded image, for instance!
This all falls within the rich content objective being pushed by Google, where their crawlers are after 'rich content.' The more images and interesting text that goes with it, the better the chance of Google adding it to search results.
SEO Metadata's code writer also authored
Image Alternate Text, which is the trifecta for your site's SEO. It helps crawlers identify images by their ALT="" descriptions. The old way was to name image file names with what the pictures were of and leave it to the crawlers to figure out. That's not always convenient however, when post authors add images like 782240.jpg for pictures of a Model T automobile. Google will not know that image 782240.jpg is of that automobile. That's where the extension gives post authors & moderators the ability to alter IMG links with
IMG alt="place image tags here." With the alt text spelling out that the image is a
Model T automobile or IMG alt="Model T automobile," then every topic will get re-crawled and the images updated and categorized to your site's searchable images...usually starting within 24 hours.
These three extensions, just make your forum that much more attractive for prospective members who see search content in online search results and for your users, who you can encourage to add more images to their topics/posts.
If you administer your domain's Google Search Console, upon installing these three extensions, you should see an immediate spike in their crawler traffic within 48 hours, because the page content your site will be producing is like crawler crack cocaine to them.
But wait, it gets better!!!
If you add
Google's Search box to your forum, you'll see similar Meta OG:Image images shown with linked topics in its search results too! You can leave the default forum search box in place. We do. Thus, you'll have social media type URL links in your topics, which Google will have similar content in its search results for both internal and external search results and your site will look like it has been modernized almost overnight. It would seem to make the forum easier to use and more attractive to current and prospective members.
One minor mention, however, just so you don't think this will be a free lunch. In your forum's historic URL topic content, each topic/post must be edited by at least one character and re-submitted for these extensions to work their magic; they only do it 'automatically' moving forward after installation. All topic/post content prior to their installation will need user/moderator editing, which reprocesses the content in this new way. Secondly, it's best if your forum PHPBB version is at least 3.3.11 and stable. There is site overhead from running the first three to their full capabilities.