The forum interface is driving me nuts. I get notified of (some, many, but not all) updates to subscribed threads. I've learned to live with missing many interesting posts in subscribed threads. However...
I don't delete emails related to bikes, even BF notifications about new posts. Today, I wanted to find a couple posts I made in an enormous thread on the C&V forum, so I searched Gmail for this:
label:bikes-for-sale are you looking motobecane
I have a Gmail filter which adds the "bikes-for-sale" label to messages matching various patterns, hence the first term. The thread title is "eBay / CraigsList finds - "Are you looking for one of these!?" Part II", hence the "are you looking" bit, and the posts in question were related to a Motobecane. This worked, great providing me with an email message which looked basically like this:
So far, so good. However, notice the URL: "...blah blah blah ... &goto=
newpost". This link makes the search results basically worthless because it will always take me to the first post in the thread which I've yet to read. There is no link in the email to the specific post itself. This thread has nearly 2500 pages of posts. Good luck finding this particular message.
The newpost URL is pretty worthless, even if that's what I wanted. If I want to go to the first unread message, there is a "View first unread" button at the top of each page, making the newpost URL superfluous. Is there some way those notification URLs can be changed to reference the specific post?
In this particular case, the Advanced thread search worked fine (constrain by user and date, only give a single keyword). For more complex searches, Gmail's search capability (or Google's more broadly) seems much more accurate.