Backlinks to a specific page on a third party server

[Pfhorrest]

Thirteen years ago I made a post on a forum for an obscure old video game, one of many posts I've made on that forum over the decades.

Today, at least the second person (others possibly deleted as spam) with no connection to that video game community has somehow found that post out of the blue and come asking me for help and advice because of the kind of stuff I wrote about in that post. (It's discussing the psychology of a video game character, and human psychology as a means to that end).

I'm curious how people are finding this obscure old forum post, and wondering if a link to it has been posted somewhere more discoverable on the internet. But I can't figure out any way to discover what links to a specific page on a third party's server. (I don't control the forum server).

"The Googles, they do nothing!"

Any ideas?

[elasto]

I guess you could ask them? I suppose they most likely browsed that forum anonymously or typed some obscure and specific search into Google, but if it's linked to from somewhere with more traffic I'm sure they could tell you.

[Xanthir]

In general, there is no way. Sometimes you can get lucky, and a Google search for the url will turn something up, but that's about all you can do as a third party.

[chridd]

Didn't Google used to have a feature to search for links to a particular page? I seem to remember being able to type something like links:http://example.com (or maybe it was link:) and get pages that link to example.com, but the last few times I tried it it didn't work, and it's not on the advanced search page either. Did they get rid of this feature?