Thanks for help. The trouble is, Katlaughing, what you describe doesnt work for recent threads, as far as I can see .The problem I was having (with searching for a couple of recent threads) led to my query . I wasnt really trying to do sneaky advertising (otherwise I wouldnt have said I was trying to do sneaky advertising). I just thought that was agood exercise in searching etc that cleverer people than me might help with. And it worked: of the many suggestions, Wolfgang's was perfect. you can search recent threads with the quicklinks search, but not with the digitrad and forum search (as far as I can see).
An interesting side-benefit from Wolfgang's tip is I have figured out a way to read long threads which was formerly impossible. It's very laborious (you have to access each individual message separately via a 3-step process); but it can be done. Yippee! Thanks, Wolfgang.