LMAO ...omg that was so funny to me.  I noticed that kid a few weeks ago and thought D***!  Why would MH put a rabid-looking child up like that?  Of all the cute kids in the world, why that one?  

Here it is.  lmao.  Give that child a COOKIE or something!

http://www.medhelp.org/

I thought it had something to do with that rabid-looking kid on the home page

I agree with the strange characters, but I don' think posts are missing because of inadvertent HTML code. When I used the "<<" convention of denoting referenced material, I received a message that HTML characters are not allowed. In other words the post did not go through. BTW a workaround in this case is to leave a space between the margin and "<". That way the software will not recoginize this as HTML code.

Strange Characters: If  you are seeing strange characters in postings you make and you cut and pasted the text from another word editor or website, the characters may be things like quote marks or other such characters.  It could also be due to a difference in the fonts being used by this forum verses those being used where the text originated.  A classic example would be to go to WordPad, or Word, and enter the capital letter "J", then go and change the font for that character to wingdings and you should see a smiley face.  Likewise a capital "L" will produce a frowning face.

Lines/posts/ etc missing: It would appear that recent changes in the forums now prevent HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language), which is the coding language for web pages, from being placed into postings.  Thus, if you precede lines with a less than or greater than sign, the line may get flagged as being HTML or removed from the posting alltogether.  Since many email programs prefix the original lines in a forwarded message with one of these signs by default, you may be attempting to copy them over to a post when you cut and paste.  This could explain some of the strange results people have been seeing when lines or entire posts do not appear to be getting posted to the forum.

Another explaination is that a post may violate the Terms and Conditions set forth for postings and may have been removed.  It looks like MedHelp is now capable of scoping removal to just a single post (i.e. comment) rather than having to remove the entire thread as they seem to have had to do in the past.  A good thing IMHO since sometimes the majority of postings to a thread have good content and often times it is a few comments which turn vicious and insulting to others and now only those offending posts can disappear whilst retaining the valuable exchanges.

Just thought I'd pass along my observations for what it's worth to others.