Say that you have hard copy of a thread from the days when SDMB was on the UBB, and would like to link to it. Obviously, the thread number is in the footer of the printout – but under the old UBB numbering system. Is there any paradigm where one can figure out what a thread that was posted on the UBB SDMB is numbered on the new board? (Assume a search comes up useless, for one reason or another – perhaps because the only word longer than three letters is in the #badwords collection that don’t get searched for?)
I don’t think so. If UBB and vB are anything like tForum (which I worked on extensively), threads and posts are numbered incrementally. Unless you know what the numbers were right before the threads and posts were incorporated into the new system, there’s no way to know what they are. For example, let’s say you have UBB threads numbered 1 to 100. If they were incorporated into the vB version when the last thread in vB was 100, the new ones would be 101 to 201. On the other hand, if they were included before any posts were made to vB, they would still be numbered the same, unless vB had a different starting number than UBB.
Another complication: Under UBB, the thread numbers were done by forum, whereas in vB, they’re board-wide. So the thread numbers won’t even have a vague resemblence.
You really ought to be able to find some useable keywords for a search. That failing, you could search for a particular sequence of posters. If you put more than one username in the “username” field, it’ll find threads where the one person posted immediately after the other. So find a couple of posters who don’t usually post together, put them in the search box, set the forum, and restrict the date range as much as you can.