Html tags are enclosed between a less-than sign and a greater-than sign, also called angle brackets when they're not in a math formula. If you try to put text that contains a less-than sign in a web page, the browser is likely to get confused. To avoid confusing the poor browser, what you do is type an ampersand ("and" sign) followed by "lt;" instead of the less-than sign. For a greater-than sign, you type an ampersand followed by "gt;". What if you want an ampersand in your web page? You type an ampersand followed by "amp;". These weird things that begin with ampersands are called character entities. You can find lists of them in html reference books or probably by doing a web search.

Ninja uses [square] brackets for emoticons, so sometimes brackets won't show up in posts at kinkyforums. Here's a lowercase i inside brackets: . There are no standard html character entities for brackets. But you can use the numbers that are the computer's internal representation for characters, so a left bracket can be typed as an ampersand followed by "#091;" and a right bracket as an ampersand followed by "#093;".

Note that Ninja's "Preview Post" button translates character entities in the message field as well as in the preview, so if you try to use character entities here, copy all the message field before you click on "Preview Post". Then, once the preview looks right, paste back into the message field and click on "Submit Post". It took me a few tries to figure this out.