Bold and italic text formatting tags don't work

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When I apply these tags, the text stays normal and does not become bold or italicized.

how exactly do you apply them?

When you select the text you want to make bold or italic and click on the letter B or slanted letter I icon in the toolbar above the text box, it puts, or "applies", "[b]" or "[i]" at the beginning of the text and "[/b]" or "[/i]" at the end of the text.

Umm - you're aware that the attribute doesn't appear in the edit window, only when the text is previewed or posted?

Yes, I'm aware of that. I meant it doesn't show when you preview the text or post it. (sorry, sometimes I don't express what I mean properly)

Odd - it worked for the bold and italic text in your earlier post.
It makes no difference whether BBCode tags are typed manually or added to selected text via a button-press because the end result is the same: an opening and closing attribute tag bracketing some text.
If the tags are mismatched or mistyped in some way then they become visible instead of silently applying the attribute, but that's not what happened above - the tags are fine and the attribute is displayed correctly.

Do these attributes all appear for you?
This is bold, italic, bold and underlined, italic and underlined.
Red text, green text, blue text.
If not, do you see the "[xxx]" tags themselves or just plain unadorned text with no attributes or tags?

When previewing your own posts do you see the tags instead of the attributes they're supposed to add?
Selecting the "Disable BBCode in this post" option at the foot of the post edit window will leave the tags intact but prevents them from applying an attribute, with the result that they appear as plain text along with the post body - but you don't have that selected as a default in your profile so it would need to be actively selected when posting (and I think you'd notice doing that ).

The application of an attribute is carried out by the forum software using html, so any browser except a plain text browser such as Lynx should be capable of decoding and rendering it for this site in the same way as it would for any others.

I only see the underlines and the red green and blue colors, but not the bold or italic. I don't see the tags themselves, just plain text with no attributes. I have a mac and the browser that I'm using is Chrome..... is that a plain text browser?

No, Chrome isn't a plain text browser but it certainly sounds like there's something weird going on with it - I know of other members using Chrome but I've not seen complaints that some specific attributes are not displayed correctly.

A quick Google search unearthed problems with Chrome displaying bold and italic attributes, some relating to bugs and others relating to issues with the font used by the browser. The last would probably show only if you've overridden the default font Chrome would normally use for a web page, or installed other fonts that get used instead.
Is your Chrome installation up-to-date? It's not a browser I'm familiar with, but there may have been problems which are now resolved.
Alternatively, starting it with any add-ons disabled might provide more clues.

My mac is an older model, and the version of Chrome that I have right now is actually out of date and there are no more updates coming in the future for chrome for my operating system.

^ Isn't that a security risk? Doesn't that mean you are using an out of date, unpatched browser?

^ This, plus the issues with rendering attributes which now seem more like unresolved bugs in an old browser.
I'd strongly recommend you install a more up-to-date browser.