Seems that if you type a <bracket> bracket,any text after a space or break will be consumed within the brackets until the bracket closes.

{`123 other stuff here}

becomes

<123>

This happens inside other objects such as code blocks too, meaning typing code causes errors if you happen to be testing less-than-a-number.

Image proof:

We are using an old and out of date phpBB 2.0.23 version of the forum software.
The latest version is at least phpBB 7.2.0.

I can not tell you what has changed within the 5 versions in between but I am will to guess it is a heap of stuff.

Now why are we living in pre-historic times I hear you ask.

The game was written in 1998 on the Red Hat 9 Linux system.
It had previously been tried to be converted to a newer Linux but this failed (before my time).

I have ported it to a recent CentOS version and it appeared to work (with a few changes) but I am still nervous due to the previous failure.

Also I would need to effectively run two versions of the server during the period that I set up the new CentOS box and run Red Hat on the old box.
The big advantage would be to be able to run the latest version of everything.