There is no native support for encryption inside ELOG, but you can use some external tool to achieve encryption. You can for example use TrueCrypt to mount a virtual encrypted drive, where you store your log files.

I can get my hand on a C compiler. What the process involved?

 Sorry, but teaching you how to compile C programs is beyond the scope of this forum. Please buy a book for that. Most C compilers also comes with some decent documentation. You might try gcc under cygwin or Visual C++.

The forum logbook is here:

https://midas.psi.ch/elogs/Config+Examples/4

the CSS file you can directly load from the server under

https://midas.psi.ch/elogs/forum/forum.css

> I tried to use the command
> Subst on edit Last Edit = $entry time
> but it gives a "-" for the Last Edit value when I edit an entry. 
> 
> I think this is because $entry time is not a variable supported by Subst. Can you add that support, or else tell me if you know a better way to go about 
> doing what I'm attempting? Is there perhaps a way to globally process a group of entries in a logbook and set one attribute's value to be equal to 
> another's?

I tried to reproduce what you said and it worked fine for me. I used:

[demo]
Attributes = Author, Type, Last Edit, Subject
Subst on edit Last Edit = $entry time

And got correctly the entry time copied to the "last edit" field when I changed old entries. I used version V.7.3-2104.

> I would like to turn off the display of attachements when editing an entry in some of our logbooks that contains big file. 
> So I did set the flag "preview attachements"  to 0. It seems to work fine on text file attachment but 
> the  thumbnails for PDF and images (very nice feature by the way!...) are still there...

I fixed that in revision 2109.

Your problem is the wrong password parameter. The "-w" password is only if a write password is defined in the config file. If the user level access is chosen however, you have to specify the username/password pair only separated by a blank such as in

elog ... -u myuser mypwassword ...

If I make "Email all" override the suppress email checkbox, some uses would complain "I check the supporess box, but my admin still gets email, what am I doing wrong here?". So while this works for you, it will not be desired for everybody. I would have to add another parameter just for this request. Couldn't you instead use the RSS feed functionality? This way you well see all entries, independent of the email notification. You can use special RSS feed readers (your browser and email client probably support this already).