The point is that our forum may not know how it currently works. When they do, they are in a position to judge whether the current Chief of the Mudcat Editing team should be permitted to this and to judge whether it is an abuse or not.

OK, it is possible that people may not know, although that is a standard way of going about things.

I did make a programming mistake with the original folkinfo code (it was modified Annexe code to work on the faster MySQL database plus a few other changes) that is relevant to what you are asking about. What I did was set the post date in the MySQL database to an "automatic time stamp" type. The effect of this was that an edit on a post updated the post's date/time.

This did not affect the order of the posts in a thread (which there is sorted in the order they got added to the database rather than the alternative, date posted) but it did change what the most recent post was, causing a "refreh".

What I can say from my experience with this error is that refreshing a thread as a result of an edit (which in many cases can be something as simple as fixing broken HTML - I think you will find it happens at MC more than you might realise BTW) is unhelpful and potentialy confusing. I would not have bothered correcting my mistake had it proved to achieve anything useful, I would instead have been pleased with my "accidental discovery".