Yeah, I experienced this yesterday. I used a mid code. It looked fine in preview. When submitted, it displayed as an empty message link, just as Ned's has. I reloaded the page and it still didn't work. I edited the post to add a comment about it, submitted it and suddenly the link worked. I then re-edited the message to remove the comments, leaving the message content essentially the same as it was the first time, submitted it and it worked fine.
Weird.
At the time I thought it was perhaps a problem with the noparse code, which I was using, but that doesn't explain Ned's problem.
The message is here;
EvC Forum: Fine tuning/ programming
Mutate and Survive
"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod