It's a pain in the arse to edit links to remove the "s" from "https". Lots of sites use SSL... like TER for example! So if one wants to include a link to a TER page, they have to first remove the "s".
Related request: remove the pre-populated "http://" for links. We're going to copy/paste the whole URL anyway, so why make us remember to remove the "http://"?
and I figured out later it was because I needed to get the S out. To me, once I know I need to do that it's not a big deal at all, but some people find certain things more annoying than others. I've seen it come up more than once on the noob board even since I learned about it so I do think it should at least be in an faq somewhere or else throw in a sentence about it in the posting guidelines in the section about what types of links are permitted and where. I didn't realize that was something TER could do anything about. You can see I'm a huge computer nerd lol.
As for the double http://, is that a problem? You're right, the whole url gets copied and pasted so then there's two there. I've always left the extra one and my links have always worked, so long as I kicked out the S. Or at least they work when I try them, maybe they don't work for anyone else.