I'm working on a site for tuberculosis and HIV patients to give them a place to voice their thoughts. The temp site is viewable here.

While most of the content will be classic blogging and inviting comments, we also want to include a place where patients can enter any topic they want and invite feedback.

Sort of like this site!

How do I set up a posting page without directing them to the "quickpost" feature, which looks like it would also let give them admin access.

This support forum approach would be perfect.

Thank you for your help.

anybody?

This site uses Invision Board - not MT.

Well, it might invite spammers, but you could create a "guest" author and post the user name and password. You could limit the access through the author permissions.

Another possibility might be to institute a review procedure for posts and post them yourself. If "authors" emerge, you could give them their own author access.

IMO, if you want a forum, use forum software. If you want blogging/publishing software, use MT. MT does that very well. It does not necessarily do forum type stuff very well.

Using MT as forum software might work for a little while, but eventually you'll reach a point where you other forum-related features that MT is unable to provide. Then you'll figure out that you really should have gone the forum software route, and there will be no way to migrate the existing MT forum to whatever you end up picking.

Thank you for all of the replies. Trying to avoid new software purchase at this point, but that may be the ultimate long term plan for the forum aspect of the site.

Thank you LisaJill for pointing out what I should have seen at the bottom of the page ("powered by Invision Power Board"). I mistakenly assumed it was MT since, well, this is the MT site.

Back to bleary-eyed-ness.

A purchase isn't required:

I have used it in the past and it is excellent, and being free helps a lot! Try it out:
phpBB
See it in action on their forum:phpBB Forum
Check styles available:
tons of styles demo page

If you decide to use phpbb, you can hook mt and phpbb together!

Using phpBB as MT comment engine

arvind- now that's teamwork :-) looking at your tutorial makes me want to reinstall phpBB. Way to go!! Awesome work.

Heh I didn't write that tutorial, I just posted a link!