Visit the Microscopic Colitis Foundation Website
Are you saying that you would rather this were set up so that this discussion board would be accessed through a link at a portal? That's actually the way that it is set up. Before I set up this board, I had a fairly extensive website. I took down most of it, in order to simplify setting up this discussion board, and in order to maintain security, back in the days when we originally had this board hidden from the public. Remember? Because we chose to hide the site, until we decided that it was "ready for prime time", special measures were necessary in order for it to be totally hidden to anyone without permission to see it, and for that to work properly, I found it advantageous to remove most of the links to pages on my original site, (since no one could see them anyway, with the site hidden). IOW, php code provides no provisions for a board to be totally hidden from sight, without imposing other restrictions that would prevent members from posting, so I had to hide the entire website, in order to make things work right.
After we "went public", I never restored it, so that only a few links remain to pages on the original site. However, if you click on the "Home Page" link, at the top of the page, you can see what's left of it, and you will see the link that leads to this discussion board. (I made it plenty big, so that no one would overlook it, in case a search engine took someone there, who was looking for this discussion board). The links to the T-Shirts page, and the Privacy Policy, for example, go to that site, (they're not a part of the php code that this board uses), but they're not linked to from the home page, though.
Anyway, that site is mostly an empty palate, waiting to be painted upon. It could be easily converted to a "conventional" MC support site. You betcha, most/all of the information forums could be converted to articles on regular web pages, so that if we preferred, these discussion boards could actually contain only discussions. Maybe it's time to make that change.
Here's the hitch, though - this board was constructed by many of us, each working on various parts. HTML code, (the basic code used to create web pages), is more vulnerable to hackers than php code, (the code this discussion board operates on), so that it's not very practical to allow authoring by anyone other than the webmaster, in order to minimize the risk of hacking. That said, if I converted those articles to regular web pages, the authors would certainly be credited. The hitch would be that those authors would no longer have editing access, so that they could change their articles at will, as they can now. That may not be much of an issue, since editing seldom occurs, anyway, after a certain length of time, but it's something to consider.
The discussion boards themselves, would still operate exactly as they do now, we would simply remove all the informational forums, and convert their contents into articles on "regular" web pages.
Any thoughts on this? I'm all ears.
Tex
i quite like where they r 
