JEEZ! The delete time is pretty short here, no?

(I mistakingly posted this under 7.0-7.2 rather than 7.3)
My linked IP addresses are no longer working because they come through as being enclosed in parentheses and -- while it used to work just fine for domaintools.com, they no longer do.
Am I missing something here that causes IPs to be enclosed in parentheses? I've been away from this code for so long -- did I put the parentheses somewhere else? lol
in my post_side.tpl
{if $postrow[post].IP}
<br />
<i><a href="http://whois.domaintools.com/{$postrow[post].IP}" target="_blank">{$postrow[post].IP}</a></i>
{/if}
My results now turned up malformed, despite them working fine recently (with parentheses; domaintools didn't care before):
http://whois.domaintools.com/(206.16.96.32)