Lymphoma forums for patients, friends and family.

[mclemore]

Several people have asked why we host message forums to help support lymphoma patients, their friends, and their familes.

Greg McLemore, the founder and CEO of WebMagic, Inc., an Internet technology firm, used to work in a retail computer store while in college. One day Ellen Cohen, the founder of the Lymphoma Resarch Foundation of America, walked in. Ellen ended up hiring Greg to occasionally help LRFA solve a variety of computing issues.

After college Greg started WebMagic. As the business grew, Greg could no longer afford to charge LRFA affordable rates for his services, so he donated them. Eventially his help was limited to Internet projects. WebMagic designed LRFA's web sites, and in approximately 1995 he donated lymphoma.org to LRFA (he later donated lymphona.net to them also).

WebMagic continued to provide free hosting to LRFA for approximately 8 years (even after Ellen Cohen died), until LRFA merged with the Lymphoma Research Foundation in 2002.

Greg kept the lymphoma.com domain name and at some point in the 1990s WebMagic started hosting these lymphoma message forums. The software that runs these boards underwent a major change a few years ago so we currently do not have any of the early messages online.

Throughout all these years, neither Greg nor anyone else on the WebMagic staff ever had any friends or family that had Lymphomna...until recently. Greg has a relative (though marriage) that was diagnosed with lymphoma about a year ago. Greg does not belived that the young woman is active on the message forums.

May Liu used to work for LRFA but left for other pursuits soon after LRFA's merger with LRF. May still answers a little e-mail for the lyphoma message boards on a volunteer basis.