Did you make sure that the textarea was inside of a block element, inside of a form with an action attribute? Did you also make sure that the textarea had its required rows and cols attribute?
Since Textareas are multi-line, I'm sure that you'd like your form to post the information instead of sending it as a "get" request. (If you don't, you should use a regular <input /> instead).
Your code should look like this:
<form action="" method="post">
* * <p><textarea rows="5" cols="20">Enter your text here</textarea></p>
</form>
I didn't put a label element because I wasn't sure what the textarea was for ^_^;
If you followed all the requirements (repeat: form elements inside of forms, no in-line elements directly in the forms, textareas have rows and columns elements; the rest is just to make sure it all holds together), then it should work out alright.
The layout should have no effect (if you're using CSS). It might be Neopets that's messing up for some reason.
Maybe it's because the textarea is empty. Empty elements are special in HTML and XHTML. Some user agents (Neopets in this case) might convert, for example, <img></img> (This is technically bad HTML as of version 4.) or <textarea></textarea> to <img /> and <textarea /> in XHTML or <img > and <textarea > in HTML, causing some problems in HTML user agents (like browsers).Try filling it in and seeing what happens, as a last resort.
