how did this get bumped
Finally someone asks! When you click the 'Add' button, it invokes a php page with a certain set of arguments. @Mishima set it up so that there was client-side blocking. The php script that delivers pages checks if the topic should be locked. My assumption is that it's based on 'is the last post 7+ days old or is the topic itself super old?'
This forum has been around for nearly a year now (wow). It's gained a lot of features across that timespan. In the very early days, posts didn't have dates, counters, really anything. Most importantly, they didn't have post times.
What I did was to invoke the 'make a comment' PHP script using the topic number of an older post (I changed the topic number, but could have invoked the PHP directly). I bypassed the client-side protection against posting against old topics. So all that was stopping me is the server-side check.
The server-side check was likely against a NULL date (since very early posts did not include a date at all). It failed, and thereby allowed me to bump this topic.
