Looking for Decent Conversation?

[kmstout]

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.

[chistev]

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]

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.

[DetectDefect]

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]

There must be a vbulletin version too!

[FergusArgyll]

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

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

[wheybags]

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

[6510]

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