form_validation messes up the POST

[eluser]Dam1an[/eluser]
If you don't create a rule (even an empty one) CI doesn't know about that particular field, so it doesn't know to get its contents on a submit, and doesn;t know of a variable called 'notes' with which to repopulate it with

On a side note, you will probably want to make all your rules trim to get rid of whitespace