Here is what I have found to be able to run WWWThreads on PHP 3, all the modifications you need to do :

1) In PHP 3, all functions must be declared BEFORE they are called. So, in some files, you need to move the functions at the top of the file. For example, in postlist.php, the show_replies function.

2) In PHP 3, you must have all variables defined into a function since PHP 3 does not support variable number of parameters to a function. The easy fix to that is to add, for example, in the function declaration = "" to variables that might not have any value on the call. For example, in main.inc.php, the send_header function, the $user setting should be $user = ""

3) In PHP 3, the "array_push" function is not available (used in addpost.php and modifypost.php, and maybe others). A workaround for PHP 3 is to replace :
array_push ($words, $line);
by
$words[count($words)] = $line;

4) In various places, arrays statements have a "," after the last value entry - PHP 4 does not mind, but PHP 3 does. Remove the "," after the last entry.

5) All "require" entries for language files produces an error. But this may be only on my host since the "require" adds automatically the first portion of the path which gives a wrong directory for the file at the end --- so with require, I must use relative path. While with "include" I can make absolute path reference. But, it might be a host configured issue. To make it work, I modified all "require" for languages files to "include", and removed the "$config[path]/" at the beginning of the file reference.

That is all I remember that I had to do to make it work with PHP 3... there might be others changes that I did but I do not remember.

Suggestion: Put a blank "index.php" into each language directories. Currently, someone could see the directory listing of all languages directories since it is not protected by a cgi-bin directory.

So, it's possible to be running the snapshot under PHP 3, but you need to modify most of the files in order to do so.