In the last 2 days I have noticed that text that is placed in brackets and/or in italics has vanished shortly after being posted, rendering posts useless. I suspect the new TV 'tech' ad has something to do with it as it was introduced at the same time.

Am I alone?

(this is a test example which could well disappear!)

Your test example has not disappeared.

It would be helpful if you posted the links of some posts with disappearing text, for a close examination.

They have returned to normal, although it remains unclear what the cause was.

Thank you for the information.

I remember seeing some posts in the past with "vanished" text, but the text was actually still there but displayed in white colour on a light-grey background, thus almost invisible. Is this what you experienced?

This puzzled me at the time but I did not follow up on it, thinking that it might have been due to the poster having written the text in a text processor and copy-pasted it into the reply box in the topic without using the special paste procedure with the icons provided for this in the menu bar at the top of the reply box. Hearing now that with your posts the text returned to normal, apparently all by itself, puzzles me even more.

Mine was there & then it was gone. On the first day I deleted the posts, on the second (yesterday) I flagged it up. 30 mins later they returned to normal without further input from me.

If you could give Maestro links to the 'exact' posts you're referring to then the Mods/Admins can look at the posts to see if they contain any erroneous BBcode (or if another Mod touched the message and cleaned the BBcode)

You can do this by locating and copying the 'link' the 'message count' -- right-click the message count number and copy the associated link address into your reply post.

For instance, your last message has a thread message labeled " #5 " that links to:

If the text was wiped on submit, it wouldn't return later. So more likely the text is 'there' but an errant BBCode was causing it to get masked.

( ) parens are usually safe to use
[ ] , { } , < > enclosing glyphs may get seen as BBcode or even gobbled by the interpreter if the app code isn't parsed correctly.