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Posted17 days agoActive10 days ago

kmstout

101 points

16 comments

Tech Discussionstory

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Web-Based Message BoardsGoogle Search OperatorsForum Software

Key topics

Web-Based Message Boards

Google Search Operators

Forum Software

If you have fond memories of misspending entirely too much of your youth on web-based message boards, or you would like to misspend more of your nights and weekends on them now, Google has you covered. Simply add

  inurl:viewtopic.php

to any query, and most, if not all, of your results will be discussion threads on boards running atop phpBB. Similarly, using

  inurl:"index.php?topic="

seems to get Simple Machines fora, and

  inurl:showthread.php

will unearth vBulletin fora. You can also combine them, like so:

  croissant AND (inurl:viewtopic.php OR inurl:showthread.php OR inurl:"index.php?topic=")

Happy holidays, and good hunting.

The hunt for retro online communities is on, thanks to a clever Google search hack that unearths vintage phpBB, Simple Machines, and vBulletin forums. As enthusiasts dive in, a warning from FergusArgyll cautions against exploiting potential security vulnerabilities, like local file inclusion, in these outdated message boards. Meanwhile, a lively discussion erupts around the unpredictability of success, with some commenters, like chistev and stackghost, debating whether humans can accurately forecast the future, especially when it involves the actions of others. The thread becomes a nostalgic trip for some, with wheybags sharing a humorous anecdote about their first PHP script.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Active discussion

First comment

22m

Peak period

0-12h

Avg / period

5.7

Comment distribution17 data points

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Based on 17 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Dec 24, 2025 at 2:28 PM EST
17 days ago
Step 01
02First comment
Dec 24, 2025 at 2:50 PM EST
22m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
13 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Dec 31, 2025 at 3:02 PM EST
10 days ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (16 comments)

Showing 17 comments

FergusArgyll

17 days ago

2 replies

And if you do find an old php message board, absolutely do not add

  ?topic=../../../../etc/passwd

6510

16 days ago

1 reply

I've just tried it on mine but nothing fun happened. What is suppose to?

FergusArgyll

16 days ago

Google / ask AI

Local file inclusion (LFI)

wheybags

17 days ago

My first php script was a file upload server for a lan party. Luckily nobody tried to upload a file named ../index.php, because I realized afterwards that it would have worked :p

chistev

17 days ago

1 reply

I posted this 23 days ago -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46100511

I've been enjoying past discussion threads on HN, currently in 2012.

Interesting conversations about how Facebook would fail back then, lol, and about how Bitcoin would not be as valuable as it is today. Who would have known?

Great site, this.

stackghost

17 days ago

5 replies

HN is (in)famous for being bad at predicting success or failure, cf. Dropbox.

Lots of very intelligent people here but, no offense to anyone, this is the last place I'd come to get product advice.

samyar

16 days ago

1 reply

Hn is the place where smart ppl give you feedback. I have benefited in many ways from hn.

lisbbb

16 days ago

1 reply

Except most of them are just book smart (if that) and have little real-world experience.

samyar

10 days ago

I think we disagree on a fundamental level. what i have perceived in HN is that most ppl here tries to point out different angles of things. even if you post something totally positive and beneficial there will be someone to point out the weak points and i love it (you can ignore them or not).

wojciii

14 days ago

1 reply

Funny you say this.

I noticed that product that succeeded are almost always products that I wouldn't buy.

So I could be used to determine the success of products. If I like it ..forget it. If i wount buy it, the the uneashed masses will and it will be a commercial succes.

I should sell this as a service ..

ultratalk

14 days ago

1 reply

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2270/

wojciii

14 days ago

Hahah. I'm pretty bad at selecting winning stocks. This could be me.

chistev

17 days ago

Lol. It's not a HN thing. I think humans just suck at predicting the future when that future involves the actions of other humans. Too many variables.

If you had read old discussion threads you'd never know Facebook would be the behemoth it is today.

thekevan

17 days ago

That's selection bias. Most replies in the post were positive.

BrandonM's comment also wasn't that unreasonable in my opinion. Imagine telling someone many years ago that we'd use an app on our phones to get in stranger's car and pay a lot for the privilege as well. His reaction to Dropbox wasn't on point but wasn't tone deaf.

Drew from Dropbox responded to the post at the time and BrandonM responded positively, praising the product.

It was overall a mature and very fair way of saying it wasn't for him.

lisbbb

16 days ago

It's because this site is inhabited by redditors who downvote comments such as yours for no other reason except to preserve the paper thin veneer of their superiority.

DetectDefect

17 days ago

I would love to see an effort to amass these corpora of knowledge into zim files for offline consumption, similar to stackoverflow et al.

https://library.kiwix.org

davedx

17 days ago

There must be a vbulletin version too!

View full discussion on Hacker News

ID: 46378431Type: storyLast synced: 12/27/2025, 7:20:23 PM

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