Hi Rick,

The Gluten File is primarily a personal endeavor of mine, that represents many hundreds of hours on my part across about five years. I had conceptualized it, and collected the bulk of the research data via PubMed, google, google scholar, etc., before the GS/CD forum even opened on the old, old, BT board. It took eight months to get the forum opened, and I was working on it the entire while I waited. I was certainly inspired by the folks on the PN forum (mrsd, rose, legna and others) and their environment of research, and I was driven by my family's unique presentation of gluten sensitivity and the fact that our doctors seemed to know nothing about it. In the years following, I have continued to maintain it with new information that I, and others, have found. A couple new pages have been added~ Anne contributed the entire Vitamin D thread, for example, and she had kept that data and resent it to me.


Having said that, The Gluten File is just a small fraction of the accumulated information we had on the forum. Missing are the long threads of dialogue that followed, with input, interpretation, and testimonials of others. I also kept an index of threads I believed to be most valuable (probably 20 or 30 created by various members of the community) in TGF, but those threads and all the information in them are gone now, too, so the index is of little use. (Except possibly as a guide for searching for cached copies...of which I have not attempted to do in wide scale) We also lost our Recipe thread that a great deal of effort was put into by other forum members. Various food study threads....lost. So many great informative threads...gone. We lost our useful websites, that contained some information that wasn't necessarily in The Gluten File. We lost our Diagnostic Journey's thread that was of considerable value. We losts many posts of PubMed abstracts, online articles, etc, that were of interest~ but not quite relative enough to be put in TGF. WE LOST ALOT!

So, in reality, although The Gluten File looks big (and it is), we still lost an awful lot. I had the bulk of The Gluten File saved from my original creation of it. I had copied my threads of the TGF once, in May 2005, so that I would have some of the updated information... just in case another crash happened (I had already needed to start from scratch before)...but even with a year old back up, I still had to re-search PubMed for all the pertinent articles of the last year.

We were organized from day 1, however, in creating informational type threads. If someone had an area of interest, they would begin a thread on it, and others would add to it. Most of those threads were merely indexed/linked in TGF, so they were all lost. I think people who spend large amounts of time researching and posting information probably should create personal files of the data. I always work in a word file first, and then transfer the data over onto the forum..that way I always have my original work.

Cara