Writing a page using this thing u call a wysiwyg

issues is with this thing some people call a wysywig editor for editing and writing to a page(not a post). If i strait code the page and place it in the editor in code view(nothing fancy just basic html i think im only using br strong a and p) anyways what its keeps doing is changing the code removing all the spaces, including the tags and is putting it all on one line or other strange things. I tried fixing this with a couple backquotes or ul’s but all hell broke loose when i used these. I got about 15-20 more lines of bull. I mean like it just duplicated all my links again at the btm and had nothing in the field

Any suggestions as to why this is happening? i was using 2.1 then i upgraded to 2.3 hoping that would fix but no change.