Thread:OmniWill/@comment-4139585-20130710154032/@comment-4139585-20130710160450

Per this thread: http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:544573

Penguin-Pal wrote: Like Cam said, move some of the content from your MediaWiki:Chat-welcome-message to another MediaWiki page and then use &lt;verbatim&gt; in the welcome message page. It should then work for you.

IE, copy the contents of MediaWiki:Chat-welcome-message to a new page (I'd suggest MediaWiki:Chat-welcome-message-code) then replace the contents of MediaWiki:Chat-welcome-message with:  Chat-welcome-message-code

That should fix the bug, but I've noticed that the same bug is causing mayhem in editing pages, too.