hey i just saw some icons near titles of many forums, there is the blue and white "speech bubble", the "bell with the speech bubble on it", and the "person with the speech bubble" can someone explain what they  are? or can  someone just write  down the link.

The legend is at the bottom of "Today's Hot Topics"

Not forgetting ...

 and

The only one that may cause confusion is 'my thread.'  For me anyway, this is more intuitive as 'threads I have commented in.'

Incidentally, in the results list returned from a topic search, ALL THREADS HAVE THE SAME ICON!

Why is that? (The LOCKED symbol would be particularly useful.)

Or especially an indication of which threads the searcher has commented in.  Sometimes I'm trying to find an older thread that I recall, in order to locate a link or something, and if I remember participating in the thread it would be nice to be able to visually weed out all the threads I hadn't posted in.