Where can I change the $url string

Admin>settings

ok, i assume your talking about Site URL: in that area and i did change that, but it only seems to affect the emails sent from the site and not the actual site links.  ie: click title to go to story.  perhaps i'm wrong and the variable is not $url, but that is the only one i could find in the source.

What happens if you change the url in Adimin Site settings to:

http://prideanddreams.com/archive/

instead of the link you have of: http://prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php?/archive/library

both take you to the same place and the one above is simplier.

they do yes, but, the intention is that when you link to
http://prideanddreams.com/archive it loads the forum with efiction in an iframe.  ok, thats fine...it defaults to efiction's main page.  but to load a different page in the iframe with a direct link it has to be in the specified format how i have it set up.

Lets say i wanted to link directly to a story, i'd have to put:

http://prideanddreams.com/archive/library/viewstory.php?sid=1

But to get it to load into the iframe within the forum it has to be linked as:
http://prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php?/archive/library/viewstory.php?sid=1

thispart: http://prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php referencing to load the forums, the first ? shows the split between urls, and /archive/library/viewstory.php?sid=1 showing what to load into the iframe, path in relation to the forum.

clicking on a link within the iframe will load it into the iframe, but for those that want to link directly to their story, i want them to be able to by right clicking their story title and it having the link ready for them.  this way of linking will not only refresh the iframe page they are viewing but refresh the main page of the forum and allow for outside linking without the user having to manually edit their link to the above format.

I assume you're looking at the $url variable in viewstory.php.  That is only used when viewing the printable version of the story in the "Archive at..." link.  eFiction uses relative URLs for pretty much everything except emails.  You can't do what you're asking without re-writing the script.  You're using SMF for your forum, so why don't you use the included bridge?

It is bridged, and thank you for the explanation.

Edit:  I did end up finding it, and not too hard to change..  what i was looking for were the links for titles and i found it in corefunctions.php

all i had to do was change_basdir to the new url and add target="_parent"  as so:

// Because this is used in places other than the listings of stories, we're setting it up as a function to be called as needed.
function title_link($stories) {
global $ratingslist, $ageconsent, $disablepopups;

$rating = $stories['rid'];
$warningtext = !empty($ratingslist[$rating]['warningtext']) ? addslashes(strip_tags($ratingslist[$rating]['warningtext'])) : "";
if(empty($ratingslist[$rating]['ratingwarning']))
$title = "<a href="" http://www.prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php?/archive/library/viewstory.php?sid=".$stories ['sid'"]."">".$stories['title']."</a>";
else {
$warning = "";
$warninglevel = sprintf("%03b", $ratingslist[$rating]['ratingwarning']);
if($warninglevel[2] && !isset($_SESSION[SITEKEY."_warned"][$rating])) {
$location = " http://www.prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php?/archive/library/viewstory.php?sid=".$stories ['sid']."&amp;warning=$rating";
$warning = $warningtext;
}
if($warninglevel[1] && !$ageconsent) {
$location = " http://www.prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php?/archive/library/viewstory.php?sid=".$stories ['sid']."&amp;ageconsent=ok&amp;warning=$rating";
$warning = _AGECHECK." - "._AGECONSENT." ".$warningtext;
}
if($warninglevel[0] && !isMEMBER) {
$location = " http://www.prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php?action=login"; 
$warning = _RUSERSONLY." - $warningtext";
}
if(!empty($warning)) {
$warning = preg_replace("@'@", "'", $warning);
$title = "<a href=""javascript:if(confirm('".$warning."'))" location = '$location'" target="_parent">".$stories['title']."</a>";
}
else $title = "<a href="" http://www.prideanddreams.com/archive/index.php?/archive/library/viewstory.php?sid=".$stories ['sid'"]."" target="_parent">".$stories['title']."</a>";
}
return $title;
}