Spellchecker adding <span> tags to data.

Hello CKEditor forums. I'm in a bit of a pickle...

I allow users in my forums to use special codes such as

[thumb1234] 

which I use a regex on and replace with a thumbnail image. There are other similar codes which I've built in. However, it looks like the newer version of CKEditor I installed v 3.2.1 with the spell checker enabled adds code that looks like this:

[<span data-scayt_word="thumb1234" data-scaytid="1">thumb1234</span>]

It seems a few others have had problems like this before but a solution has not been proposed other than disabling the spell checker:
http://dev.ckeditor.com/ticket/8212

I'm grabbing the data via $_POST['post'] from a PHP script. My editor is initiated by jquery.

Is there a way to prevent this unnecessary <span> tag mess from making it into the submitted post data?

Thank you so much for any help you could give!


HTML:

      <textarea name="post" id="topic_post">
      </textarea>

Javascript:

      <script type="text/javascript">
      $(document).ready(function() {

         $('#topic_post').ckeditor( function(){
            /* callback */
            }, {
            height: 200,
            toolbar: "Basic",
            customConfig : '/conf/conf.forums_cke.js'
         });
         
         
      });
      </script>