There was too much abuse of the facility I'm afraid. Basically I figured it was best to just remove it rather than spend so much time editing out hotlinks (also known as bandwidth theft) and javascript coding etc. After all, this is a discussion forum rather than a "look at me I can do this piece of coding" forum.
That's a good point, but sometimes colours can really accentuate a message and help bring home a point. Is there any chance that colours could be re-instated? Is this even possible without turning on all HTML features?
I'm sorry, colours probably won't be back (it is technically possible without turning on html, but the risk of invisible text is too dangerous), but, you can use bold and italics to emphasize words.