On this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=135570
Truckerfan replied to my post, his post is there but the reply count and last post were not changed! Yes, I know it is the hamster’s fault. . .
This error also happened to me before as a replier in a different thread.
In all those cases the hamster also did not bump the thread up!
So the silly question on board protocol is: it is ok to bump a thread under those conditions?
You’re saying that after Tucker’s post showed up in your thread, you went back to the GQ main forum page, and the thread wasn’t up at the top of the forum, even though it ought to have been, if Tucker had just posted? And you want to know if it’s okay, under those circumstances, to give the thread another “bump”, by posting yourself, just so as to make sure your thread is up at the top of the forum?
IMO the answer is, “Only if you’re an absolute attention junkie, who just can’t live with the fact that your thread isn’t occupying its rightful place at the top of the forum, so all and sundry will see that someone has found it worthy of his attention and has posted to it, and who just can’t wait for the server to catch up with what’s still moving through its data pipeline…”
In other words–no. 
Do you really think that posting again would help? Fora aren’t updated as quickly as threads, because that would slow the server to a crawl.
I don’t see anything wrong with it in moderation. Yes, give the hampsters a chance to do their job, but in many cases I think the updates never get completed. Or if the missing data is synced up during the nightly maintenance, the old post time would still leave the thread on the second or third page.
I would be more tempted to bump a thread that I responded to because I might wonder whether the OP saw my reply. For the OP himself to bump the thread, I would wait a while before doing that and only is the post which didn’t register completely adds something significant to the thread. In that case a bump would allow me to see that there is a new reply to a thread I had been following but would not otherwise open.
Don’t bump it, you’re just contributing to the problem.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator