[jasondavis]

On my profile page this shows up
<b>test</b> instead of the test being bold it shows the tags as well

here is the input for it:
<textarea name="bio" value="{$user.bio|escape}"cols="35" rows="8">{$user.bio|escape}</textarea>

The sql field for it:
`bio` text NOT NULL,

[CMIVXX]

It sounds as if you have run htmlspecialchars() on the data before you have submitted it to the database. If you look at the raw data coming from the database, I can imagine that the data is clean BUT, the <B> will be &lt;B&gt;

[jasondavis]

in phpmyadmin it looks like this
<b>test</b>

I searched through the code and cant find anything like htmlspecialchars() anywhere

[jasondavis]

I have to add that the output is displayed in a smarty template