thanks for the reply, but surely that filter will download all threads from 
folder 'forum' that begin with a number?  If so, that will be every single
thread in the entire forum (i.e. including those from subsection2,
subsection3, subsection4 etc which I DONT want). 

I only want the threads that occur under subsection1.  I think we agree that
we can't do this from the path structure. 


The only key that exists to group my desired threads is the fact that they are
all linked from the html file in <http://www,main_url.com/forum>
/subsection1name . Is there any way of automatically using the links in that
html file to determine what
gets downloaded ? 

thanks