Well, my first advise is to see if it worked/s without any of the design changes you have made. It would be good to asses where the problem stems from. Can you restore default somehow? If the default designs do not work then we know the issue is nothing to do with the html, but something else all together.
I think that you have entered this html in either the Settings page “header of public pages” field or on the “header” field on a specific subscribe page. It looks like there is a problem with the php setting for magic_quotes.
I see that you are using phplist 3.0.9 so you must have either had the problem for a while and not noticed or it has suddenly started happening, so please can you explain the background to the problem.
You can get the default values for “header of public pages” and “footer of public pages” by logging-in to the demo system and going to the Settings page. Then copy/paste the html into your phplist.
There was a bug introduced in release 3.0.9 that caused your problem https://mantis.phplist.org/view.php?id=17485
You should upgrade to the latest release of phplist. After that you then might have to edit the header of public pages value to remove the erroneous \ characters.
though my version does include several options including the AGP Capture and responsive forms hence the non alignment of the fields. I’ll continue to have a play, though as Duncan has said upgrading to the latest version would be a good idea.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out but I am so lost.
I am running 3.0.9 so I don’t understand how I can upgrade to something I already have. The code in the header of in the back end does not have the \ characters present but it does show up when I view code from the front end in the browser.