Hi Lenitus. 
Sorry for the delay; it’s been a nutty week.
Here’s what I used to do. Say the thread was started a year ago, and is now 200 pages. I’m looking for a particular conversation I dimly remember happening last winter. So in the past, there was a little “Go To” tool, and I could jump directly to page 100. If that wasn’t far enough, I could then jump directly to page 80, and so on. Once I was in the neighborhood, I would fine tune using the forward and backward arrows, or the numbered page links. I used to be able to find past conversations fairly quickly this way.
Now, if I’m on page 200 and I want to get to page 100, I have to use the numbered page links, but on any given page, they only go back 3 or 4 pages. So from my page 200, I’d have to click 196. Once that loads, I’d have to click 192, then 188, and so on. That’s what I meant by tedious.
Advanced search wouldn’t work in the case I’m thinking of, since there weren’t any words or terms I remember which would have been unique in the context of the thread. I tried searching by date, “within one month of 1/1/14” – asking for December and January posts – which produced 65 pages of results in the Parent Café. I could cull through those and look for posts in the specific thread, but that’s maybe even more tedious than clicking back through the thread 3 pages at a time. And if what I’m looking for wasn’t in one of two those months, I’d need to search again using a different date.
Does that make sense?