I got this option turned off, but the forums seems to ignore this. I once turned it on to see if it would fit and then deactivated it again... with the result that it will be shown with an infinite maximum of Characters. it messes my whole forum up.
Note: If I turn the option on, the limit for maximum characters works fine.

Here are some pictures:

Bug itself


Option settings



Edit: I only have this problem in firefox. Does anyone know something about this?
Edit2: In Opera I got the same problem. It seems to work only for IE, but it worked for everything previously.

it seemed to have been a problem on my computer. After a restart ir works all better now ;-)