It's not just forums. So many things, both internal and external at HP are like that for some weird reason (for a very long time now)
holy cow.
A former HP employee told me that a creating named subdomain required a VP-level signoff, while those "license plate" style subdomains could be provisioned by almost anybody via a self-service tool. So if there isn't a real reason for a nice URL, people tend to create license plate subdomains.
For some reason HP has always had those god awful links that look like the average phishing scam link. I think their docs and even the main website used to have a similar URL pattern at some point.
Why would a malicious URL look malicious though, if it was trying to be malicious?
You have never heard of phishing?
Don’t they usually try at least to have a domain that sorta looks like the original? It’s not like they use phishing.bigbank.abc.xyz - the domain isn’t supposed to look suspicuous