If you access your board and it appears that topics are available from the top page, but you get the message "You are not authorized to edit any topics" when logging into administration, even if you are the superuser, then your board-topics.html file was probably corrupted. This can happen if you edited the board-topics.html file with an HTML editor such as Microsoft FrontPage. Such editing is unsafe and results in the transformation of the data into FrontPage's format, which is not readable by Discus. Other symptoms of the problem include no topics showing up in the dropdown list boxes in your search screens.

To fix this problem, log into administration as the board administrator (typically "admin"). Go to Data Recovery - Topics and select the option to regenerate the topics page. This will place all topics back onto your topics page. Any edits you did with your HTML editor will be lost but your topics will be accessible. To avoid this problem in the future, follow these tips:

• To set colors on your board, use the Appearance Manager (in version 3.x, the "Board Manager"). Do not set colors by manually editing the board topics page.

• To edit the wording on the topics page, use the Appearance Manager (in version 3.x, the "Board Manager") to set the title message and main message.

• For additional customization possibilities for the topics page, in version 3.10 and higher, edit the board's skin, rather than editing the topics page directly.

• NEVER use an HTML editor like FrontPage or Netscape Composer to edit your board-topics.html page.

• If you must manually edit the topics page, use a simple text editor such as Windows Notepad and be extremely careful not to touch any of the special tags used by Discus.