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
  
  
  
  • Around the time snowballs were introduced, it even noted that snowballs do not affect players
  
  
  
  


• 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
  
  
  
  


• Snowballs being unable to hit players is marked as a "bug" in the bug tracker, yet the mods too seem unsure whether this was ever actually a feature
  
  
  
  • A similar bug report was closed for being a "Feature request"
  
  
  
  


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


• I personally checked the following versions, and snowballs did no knockback or damage:
  
  
  
  • 1.8.3 full release
  
  
  • 1.2.5 full release
  
  
  • 1.0.0 full release
  
  
  
  


• I cannot find anywhere/anyone that gives a version when this change was supposedly made.

So what's happening here? My first guess would be that it was a Bukkit feature, but people seem very opposed to that citing that they remember it in vanilla. Is there any proof that snowballs knocking back players was actually ever a vanilla feature? If so, in what version was this a feature?