Games : Have snowballs ever been able to hit players in vanilla?

Have thrown snowballs in any vanilla version been able to hit, as in cause the damage animation and knockback (not necessarily actually taken away hearts, and not just disappearing on collision), other players in vanilla Minecraft?

I've been searching about this for a while, but have only found conflicting claims:

• The IGN wiki claims "If an almost defeated enemy tries to tower up high into the sky to escape, you can simply throw snoballs [sic] at him until he falls down."
  
  
  
  • A few other PVP guides also claim that snowballs can be used to knock back players
  
  
  
  


• The Minecraft wiki makes no mention of snowballs affecting players, or ever having done so.


• Many people seem to remember having snowball fights, even on unmodded servers.
  
  
  
  • For example, in this Reddit thread TheWyo claims it was a Bukkit plugin, and gets 26 downvotes.
  
  
  • Another thread, in which everyone seems to agree it was once a vanilla feature.
  
  
  
  


• Snowballs being unable to hit players is marked as a "bug" in the bug tracker, yet the mods too are debating on whether this was ever actually a feature


• There are Bukkit plugins which allow snowballs to damage players, which may be a cause of the confusion.


• Checking a limited number of past server versions, I could not find one in which snowballs affected other players.

So what's happening here? My first guess would be Bukkit, but people seem very opposed to that. Was snowballs hitting players actually ever a vanilla feature?