Now I may be wrong, but given that the shouts are likely stored in FA's DB under the VARCHAR type, its possible the backward slashes or \ character is removed automatically as it is considered in most programming languages an "escape" character.
An example of this is if I wrote the line
"Even I'm just trying to post a shout" the server would read my line and determine that the apostrophe would likely break the line of code (opening up a possibility for SQL injection), so it escapes it by placing a backward slash in front of the apostrophe.
So even though I wrote it without the slash, it will alter it to contain a slash (
"Even I\'m just trying to post a shout") and then whenever it is shown on a page, it will parse it without the slash for easy reading by the end user.
In short, it could be a small bug in the code, OR as I pointed out above, it may be a deliberate move to remove the possibilities of SQL injection (although I do believe FA is/was vulnerable to this at some point or another). For the sake of clarity on the situation regarding slashes, I would refer this matter to
@SSJ3Mewtwo or
@yak as they would hopefully be able to confirm or deny if this is intended or otherwise.
As for your create thread problems, are you running any extensions or add-ons in your browser that may be interfering with the current webpage? (AdBlock, Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, NoScript etc)
