Since I became a moderator in 1997, I have been renaming threads and messages to make them easier to find. My renaming tactics are designed to work well with the Filter and with the "Subject" search engines at Mudcat - they are focused on keywords. The Filter at the top of the list of threads searches for threads by thread name, and that's the Mudcat search engine I use most often. The Old Advanced Forum Search is in the QuickLinks dropdown menu on almost every Mudcat page. The best tool on that page is the "Subject" search, which searches by message title. https://mudcat.org/forumsearch.cfm The trick in both the Filter and "subject" search is not to make your search too narrow. Put one word or one phrase in the search box, a term that is not likely to have alternates. Search for something distinctive, not for the full title. We don't have a full text search that works very well. It's better to use Google to search Mudcat for that. Search for "phrase in quotes" mudcat.org, and you'll be amazed at what you'll come up with. Better yet, use Google to search for TWO phrases in quotes.
Oftentimes, you're best off doing a two-stage search. Do a broad search first, and then use CTRL-F to search the results.