# Disappearing poll from the pre-Discourse era

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/disappearing-poll-from-the-pre-discourse-era/938301>\
**Category:** Site Feedback\
**Created:** [March 20, 2021, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/disappearing-poll-from-the-pre-discourse-era/938301 "2021-03-20T15:00:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 8

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**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/codinghorror/32/4242_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2021, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/disappearing-poll-from-the-pre-discourse-era/938301/8 "2021-03-22T21:29:18Z")

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OK! so here’s the old URL format:

`https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=<id>`

The best we can do at the moment is to **generate a list of all topics with the word “Poll” in the topic title**. That doesn’t necessarily mean there was a poll in the topic though. Here’s one that _seems_ to have been a vBulletin poll: topic id `442232`?

[https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=442232](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=442232)

… which redirects to …

[https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-poll-for-gay-dopers-how-comfortable-accepting-is-your-family/424659](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-poll-for-gay-dopers-how-comfortable-accepting-is-your-family/424659)

Looking at that URL [in the wayback machine](https://web.archive.org/)…

[![Imgur](https://i.imgur.com/WvOnCQy.png "imgur.com") ](https://imgur.com/WvOnCQy)

Yay, there is one 2018 crawl! Woohoo! This is why I (and you, if you can afford it) should have a [monthly donation](https://archive.org/donate/) set up to the Internet Archive. 🙌

But unfortunately I don’t see a poll anywhere in that archived page? 😢

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180717041524/https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=442232](https://web.archive.org/web/20180717041524/https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=442232)

If others would like to assist, [**here’s a Google Sheet**](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YH3abEidbCi1od7MNXT-hR4kPkug2lds7RC2RTPR8iY/edit?usp=sharing) with a list of all Straight Dope vBulletin thread ids that **have the word “Poll” in the title**. I ordered them by id so you can get a rough idea of time by the id; earlier topics have smaller id numbers.

edit: we’re revising the sheet to better match just the word “poll”, so it’ll be less than ~3,500.

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_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/disappearing-poll-from-the-pre-discourse-era/938301)._