Do I post what I found here? Do I send a detailed e-mail to the e-mail address? I can’t flag some/all because I get errors about new members not being able to send links. I saved off the entirety of the chatbot tutorial webpage for reference although I’ve not done that in a while so we’ll see how handy that is!
I’d not heard of the forum before. Only found out today about the demise of Chowhound and read about HO and it seemed more like something up my alley anyways or at least I hope so.
Ruins
Welcome. I’m having trouble figuring out what your question is?
If you’re talking about the Discourse tutorial, when I did it I noticed that a fair number of its references were to the standard, out-of-box version of Discourse, whereas this one in use here has some modifications.
Once you’ve been here (I believe) two weeks, you should be able to use links.
Welcome to Hungry Onion, by the way!
Damned spammers . . .make life tough for the non-shills of the world 
True. It’s an unfortunate necessity, though. Ten years ago requiring a link-back email was enough to thwart most of the spammers, but this system works well enough.
I post a lot at another `site that requires only 2 weeks residence (without any interim posting) and the bots just sign up by the thousands, wait 2 weeks, then start spamming the heck out of it. Runs the poor mods ragged but (unlike here) the Forum Admin/owner hasn’t paid attention it for 10 years or so, despite the pleas from the mods.
Yrs, restricting new users is a PITA, but not as much as chasing bots.
Thanks. The tutorials are from the forum software, so its not tailored to the site. If it refers to anything that has been customized, then there may be mismatches/ errors.
