I agree with you, but I'm also curious if the techniques that are making progress in other areas (e.g. machine learning) could be used to extract meaningful dat

I agree with you, but I'm also curious if the techniques that are making progress in other areas (e.g. machine learning) could be used to extract meaningful data from these forums. Most bugs won't be as obvious as "login as root without password" but I imagine there is substantial signal within the noise.