Looking for Decent Conversation?

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.

68 points | by kmstout 2 hours ago

4 comments

  • chistev 1 hour ago
    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 54 minutes ago
      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.

      [-]
      • thekevan 35 minutes 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.

      • chistev 34 minutes 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.

  • DetectDefect 14 minutes 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 2 hours ago
    There must be a vbulletin version too!
  • FergusArgyll 1 hour ago
    And if you do find an old php message board, absolutely do not add

      ?topic=../../../../etc/passwd
    [-]
    • wheybags 3 minutes 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