is there anyway to disable this through the forums/calendar?

the problem being (the calendar really being the issue) is if we include links to say google maps (which a lot of our calendar events do)

they come accross as http://maps.google.c...5789,-0.1910935 rather than

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=51.4815789,-0.1910935

which is fine through the calendar itself the link stays clickable as only it's "text" as changed, but seeing as these calendars are exportable to other devices/calendars/outlook etc etc it renders them useless as they get the link as the shortened text rather than the href behind it.

You can go to the bbcode management area in the ACP and disallow the "url" bbcode from parsing in Calendar events.