Took me a bit to track this one down, so I’ll create a post here about it in case someone else runs into the problem.
With the introduction of nofollow plug-in (and Movable Type 3.15), something has gone wonky with the way that the MT HTML sanitize specs are applied to the MTPings tag. Essentially, all HTML will get stripped out of an MTPings container … and extra line breaks (</br>) will be inserted.
(Which was causing me some odd formatting problems at the top of this blog, where I use the MTPings container for listing recent trackbacks).
According to this thread in the support fora, it’s been reported, and you can get around it by either explicitly dropping sanitize in the MTPings container (<MTPings sanitize=”0″>) or else by adding the tags you need to the santize spec in mt.cfg or on a per-weblog config panel basis. The former strikes me as a more secure process.
So … if you’ve been struggling with odd formatting around MTPings … now you know why, and how to solve it.
And, looking back at it, this is one of the more technically jargon-laden posts I’ve had here in a while. I hope too many eyes didn’t glaze over.