[Steve_Seattle]

"Bump, BTTT, means to reply to a thread for the purpose of keeping it current on the screen. This works for only a very short time since everything scrolls by rapidly."

I've always wondered about that. Does something remain at the top of the queue simply because it gets a lot of hits? It's never seemed that way to me. It seems that topics move down the list as they are supplanted by new posts, and that this has nothing to do with how many hits a post receives.

[RightWhale]

It seems pointless to bump since the volume of traffic is so large. It might be a way of bookmarking a thread for oneself, or just saying 'hey'. The ping is more useful since a group with known or suspected interests can be called to a thread long after it has scrolled into the bit bucket.