A few updates:

[MikeyPI]

I was able to tamper with the system and sort out a few things for the site:

Firstly, the polling system is configured now, due to how the software changed I had to enable a setting which lets someone change their vote, but now users/posters should have the ability to not only edit existing polls, create new polls (in existing topics or new ones) and know that all users may re-vote upon editing the poll.  I advise the poll creator to reset the vote count to 0 when they edit the polls, since the count on the votes would remain, even though the question posed is different.  This is the best solution I was able to come up with to this problem, but it should suffice to make polling possible again.

The hyperlinking issue:

You can link to outside sites/sources perfectly fine, I have tested this with http:// www. in many different facets, the link tool works fine for external linking, pictures also post perfectly fine from my testing (so long as the external source site permits it). Some images will not display but it seems to be because they are embedded into a page instead of a picture by it's self; if you use the direct-link  to the picture it seems to work fine from my random testing (googling images and posting them). 

Internal linking: Trying to link from the forum to another place in the forum, such as your signature and/or links as text faults out:  This is due to a change in the software where it wants to show a "preview" of the topic in question: (see below):

Because of the above feature and it trying to "load" the preview, it unfortunately makes it to where the link as-text does not want to work, instead it turns it into plain-text.. I've yet to find a resolution to this particular problem and have no clue why it does this, nor can I find a setting to disable this function.  In essence, so long as the system does this preview of an internal link like it has above, I don't think it will permit link-as-text for internal locations.. A feature which might be great for smartphones/tablets, but limits PC users greatly, I will continue to try to find a way to tamper with this, but have a feeling it's embedded in the software.

Image Linking:

As mentioned above I tried image linking and seemed to have problems with embedded images (where they load on a page) but did not encounter such issues with direct-linking the image, as a rule of thumb from my testing it's best to paste it as text in the post.  www.picture.com/mypicture.jpg for ex, if it shows the picture in the post preview, it'll show in the post.  The alternative of the "Insert other media" and "Image from URL" worked as well, but did not always provide the preview in testing..  It seems that so long as images are not embedded to a page and are direct-linked they seem to load fine to me.

This is where the site is at, sorry I cannot resolve ALL the issues, but in the update many settings were removed which were extremely useful, so it's more trying to work around the missing functions than anything else.  The cost of updating to a forum which is more mobile-friendly is that the PC end has to take a hit.

-Mike